Updated Friday evening
The Times Marcus Leroux Crucifixion ‘makes God into a psychopath’.
Telegraph Jonathan Petre Crucifixion makes God seem like a psychopath, says cleric.
The Guardian’s correspondent Stephen Bates wrote a piece for the newspaper which didn’t get printed. You can read it below. Maybe TA readers would like to suggest what headline the newspaper should have used…
Update Friday evening A revised version of this article has now been published at Comment is Free under the title To forgive is divine.
And Damian Thompson of the Telegraph has blogged The sound bite that sunk its teeth in.
Update Friday morning
William Crawley has helpfully linked to the two-page BBC Religion discussion of Theories of the Atonement.
Article by Stephen Bates
Evangelical Anglican bishops yesterday expressed their dismay that the BBC had allowed Dr Jeffrey John, the dean of St Albans who four years ago was hounded out of a bishopric because of his homosexuality, to give a “tragic” Lenten talk criticising their view of the Good Friday crucifixion by claiming it made God out to be a psychopath.
Insisting that their attack had nothing to do with renewing their assault on Dr John, the two suffragan bishops, the Rt. Revs. Pete Broadbent of Willesden and Wallace Benn of Lewes, claimed their criticism was theological not personal. They admitted, however, that they had not read the talk before launching their attack.
In the broadcast last night, Dr John said that the evangelical belief that Christ atoned for the sins of the world through his execution, made God out to be a monster: “What sort of God was this, getting so angry with the world and the people He created and then, to calm himself down, demanding the blood of His own son? And anyway, why should God forgive us through punishing someone else? It was worse than illogical, it was insane. It made God sound like a psychopath. If any human being behaved like this we’d say they were a monster.”
Dr John was forced to stand down as the newly-appointed Bishop of Reading in 2003 by Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, his old friend, who had previously endorsed the appointment, following protests by evangelicals. The dean has admitted being gay and in a long-term relationship which he insists is chaste but has in the past spoken in favour of a more accepting attitude to gays in the church.
The doctrine of substitutionary atonement or penal substitution as it is called, remains highly controversial even among evangelicals. Critics say it makes no sense of Christ’s frequent talk of forgiveness in the Gospels and also devalues the importance of the Resurrection story on Easter Sunday. Dr John said: “God shows He knows what it is like to be the loser; God hurts and weeps and bleeds and dies…he bears our griefs and shares our sorrow.”
Bishop Broadbent said: “I think he is not being true to Scripture. He denies that there is a need for atonement… and wants us to see the death of Jesus as only expressing self-giving love and entering into ultimate suffering. It is of course – thank God – but it is also so much more. He is caricaturing the doctrine in order to criticise it. I am not being homophobic. It’s not a war on Jeffrey John. I’ve got nothing against him at all.”
In an entry on the Guardian’s Comment is Free website, the Rev. Giles Fraser, vicar of Putney and a friend of Dr John’s, wrote: “Easter is a time for stringing up the innocent and this year once again the sacrificial victim is the dean of St Albans. We all know the reason why he’s hated by conservatives…not because he’s gay but because he’s honest…he has been saying nothing but the truth known by most people in the pews: that the idea of God murdering His son for the salvation of the world is barbaric and morally indefensible.”
Dr John himself last night insisted his remarks were in line with the Church of England’s doctrinal commission on the subject, drawn up among others by Dr Williams and the evangelical bishop of Durham, Dr Tom Wright, who said at the weekend he was “fed up” with the BBC for allowing such “unfortunate views” to be broadcast.
Dr John said: “One of the reasons I wanted to give the talk was that the doctrine of the cross I was taught as a child kept me from faith for a long time and I have met very many others who have reacted in the same way.”
It’s interesting that both the gentleman from The Times and The Telegraph present Dr Johannes Calvinus’s mid 16th century Penal Substitution theory on the Atonement as the one and only, instead of saying that it is but the latest of a number of different theories, not even shared by all Evangelicals.
I wonder why?
(or do I 🙁
As far back as 1963, J S Bezzant, then Dean of St John’s College, Cambridge, after summarising the traditional doctrine of penal substitution, remarked, ‘This outline has been so shattered that the bare recital of it has the aspect of a malicious travesty’. Why is this discredited doctrine being resurrected now to attack Jeffrey John, when he was only saying what serious theologians have believed for more than half a century? (See Objections to Christian Belief, 82-4).
Once again the bishops of the Church of England demonstrate their talent for shooting from the hip. The peremptory denunciation of the good Dean’s comments – without having read the text – by Wallace Benn and Pete Broadbent, and the pompous comment from Tom Wright are just further proof that the bishops of our church occupy an increasingly strange place. What are bishops for? Surely more than all of this. Change will inevitably come, but in the meantime thank God for Jeffrey John. He speaks words that people can understand, that resonate with their experience and speak of the love… Read more »
Ok, John could have been a bit more tactful, perhaps. But nothing he says is undoctrinal, and of course many Anglicans would agree with him. It is just unfortunate that this should emerge at this particular moment to remind us of the many, many theological disagreements among Anglicans which we have been able to live with (relatively) happily for 450 years.
“Insisting that their attack had nothing to do with renewing their assault on Dr John.” Back to the old mantra – “it’s not their lying to me that I object to, it’s their assuming that I’m stupid enough to believe them”.
This may be a good time to remember too often forgotten last stanza of John Godfery Saxe’s “The Blind Man and the Elephant”…
So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
In the marvelous Victorian Lenten cantata “The Crucifixion,” Stainer’s librettist, the Rev. J. Sparrow-Simpson, entitles a hymn “The Mystery of the Divine Humiliation.” It seems to me that is what Dr. John is asking us to recapture, to abandon our foolish need to try to explain everything and to throw ourselves into the mysterious grace through which God acts on and in us. If the task of theology is to talk about the unknowable, we at least need to accept that our theology must be done with humility. If pride is the worst sin, the worst pride is asserting that… Read more »
The cultural context, as always, plays a key role here. Jeffrey and I grew up in a Wales where many around us had been through a “Moore College” experience a generation or two before. It had gripped our nation in an extraordinary Revival. Calvinism in its various guises had left a deep mark on the soul of Welsh people even though the fervour had quickly given way to repulsion for the consequences of this type of theology. Reading his piece I understood exactly where he was coming from. This was a very personal story, yet one to which a large… Read more »
Damian’s article made me smile. He understood the nihilistic parallels with other absolutist theologies.
Martin – I take your point and yet I am left with the impression that not only J. John’s *rejection* but also his *understanding* of the doctrine of penal substitution has not risen beyond that of a ten year old listening to some bad preaching in a Welsh chapel. J. John may well have legitimate issues with people in his past but can we not expect the dean of a cathedral to have studied some of the best of penal substitution theology before rising to condemn it as a whole? By all means, condemn the caricature (Jesus all passive instrument,… Read more »
Thomas Renz wrote: “I am left with the impression that not only J. John’s *rejection* but also his *understanding* of the doctrine of penal substitution has not risen beyond that of a ten year old listening to some bad preaching in a Welsh chapel.”
Sorry, but you have a problem, Thomas.
There are 10ths of thousands of us who have the same experience of listening to bad people preaching bad theology in both Cathedrals and chapels.
Penal Substitution is but a mid 2nd Millennium heresy. I shall not give it a second chance.
There are all sorts of approaches to this topic, but they are all in the realm of working and reworking of myth (that is, repeating truths). Sometimes you have to demythologise, sometimes what you have is remythologised. In a recent service I took I demythologised one part of the Stations of the Cross of Jesus falling with Simon still helping to a couple tackling the crisis of debt, caused even by worthwhile burdens. At other times, I remythologised, by (for example) talking about the weight of the cross as the weight of sin, or changing time and location. I made… Read more »
No, Thomas – you give it a respectability it does not deserve. You may think it deserves ‘consideration’ – but I wouldn’t agree.
Different religious world-views, again – no blood sacrifices as punishment, thank you.
I tire of those who attempt to defend the PS theory on the grounds that ‘you (=I)clearly don’t understand it properly’. SO far as I can see, a doctrine so easily corrupted, so difficult to express without falling into gross immorality is not worth the paper it’s written on. I think Calvin the Lawyer, living in a chaotic Europe, did the usual thing of finding in the Cross a sign of hope and an answer to his longings: he longed for Law And Order, for an absolute monarch who’d bang heads together as necessary, and for a bit of necessary… Read more »
I see on Titus 1:9 that the Pope has given us his views in a new Primer:
http://titusonenine.classicalanglican.net/?p=18669
I am not quite sure just where the real caricature is here Thomas. Is it Jeffrey of PS through the eyes of a Welsh childhood or yours of his personal testimony?
The polemic against “penal substitution” is very confusing. What is meant by it? If it is an attack on some gloomy theology held by a minority of Christians why give it the prominence it has latterly received? Christ in the New Testament is certainly substituted for us — as the paschal lamb that bears our sins, a scapegoat in fact. That has always been a source of peace, strength and joy to Christians. Calvin is the one supposed to have invented the gloomy PS theory. But Calvin was a very sober and biblical theologian — I doubt if he was… Read more »
Fr Joe, there are special Anglican problems with regard to certain aspects of PS, as you may be aware.
In some parts of the Anglican Communion a certain form of PS has become the mark of “orthodox” belief. So much so that if you are not willing to subscribe to their singular understanding of the theory you may not be employed in any ministerial capacity.
Your post presumes this possibility – it is in fact correct.
So Göran is not the only one who persuaded himself that Calvin invented penal substitution. Would anyone care to explain how Calvin differs from, say, Aquinas? The major works of both are readily available on the internet so it should not be too difficult to demonstrate the difference. Are those who so violently oppose the notion of penal substitution, claiming it to be a late invention, in happy agreement with the exposition of Christ’s death in Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho; Eusebius of Caesarea, Proof of the Gospel; Hilary of Poitiers, Homily on Psalm 53 (54); etc. see http://piercedforourtransgressions.com/content/category/5/15/52/ If… Read more »
I am sorry if I caricatured J. John – it was not my intention to do so. I was seeking to explain his ridicule of any idea of divine wrath and retribution. Thank you, Martin, for the link to the Pope. His is a critique of mechanistic notions of the atonement with which I agree.
By the way, and only because he has been mentioned, T1-9 also has a link to a quote from Karl Barth: http://titusonenine.classicalanglican.net/?p=18675
I prefer to think of metaphors of atonement rather than models of atonement – maybe it is just semantics – but in geometry I was taught ‘never have a single model of something you don’t understand, because the model will mislead you’. This thread is missing reflection on physical metaphors – the gates of hell shall not prevail, Christ has broken down the dividing wall etc The curtain of the temple was a symbol of God’s holiness, created out of human understanding of who God is. The danger of an unbalanced understanding of holiness and justice is that we put… Read more »
Can we please stop confusing the Very Rev Jeffrey John, Dean of St Albans, and the person whose views are under discussion here, with J.John, the evangelist and most recently leader of the ‘Just 10’ initiative (whose views on this, I suspect, though I do not know, may be rather different from the Dean’s)? At least one person, either on this thread or a related one, has conflated them into one person.
JBE – my use of “J. John” on this and a related thread was meant as an abbreviation for “the Very Rev Dr. Jeffrey John, Dean of St Albans”. In my own mind, the Dean is clearly distinct from the evangelist who goes by the name of “J. John” but I apologise for any confusion caused.
Don’t you think that we should just be very grateful to Jeffrey for causing so much attention to be focused on the Atonement? People who perhaps wouldn’t have thought too much about the subject are now drawn into debate, are thinking seriously about one of the most important aspects of our faith. Thank God (in every possible way) for Jeffrey John, say I, and may he continue to provoke discussion and stimulate faith.