THE FALSE DOGMA OF PENAL-SUBSTITUTIONARY ATONEMENT
This lecture series defends the idea that Christ’s dying for us is neither penal, nor substitutionary, nor even rightly called "atonement" (the lexical meaning of which word is “reparation for a wrong or an injury”). Rather, Christ’s dying is the final step of the incarnation, the purpose of which is to heal the human condition by fusing that condition in its entirety (death included) to divinity. Click on the graphic below to hear Episode 47: "Christ, the Lamb of God," a sample lecture from the series. 


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Below is a description of each of the podcasts.
Introduction to Series 1 ▾︎
This lecture introduces the competing soteriologies of atonement and redemption. Whereas “atonement” denotes the idea that Christ’s work on the cross is reparation for a wrong or an injury done to God, “redemption” denotes the idea that Christ’s work on the cross rescues mankind from a state of sinfulness and the consequences thereof. This stipulative definition of redemption forms the core of what will be called the restored-icon model throughout the rest of this series.

The restored-icon model describes the soteriological understanding most prevalent within Eastern Orthodoxy. However, it is not the only Eastern-Orthodox model attempting to account for all of the biblical data on the subject. Noted clergymen within the Orthodox Church in America (OCA) and Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR)--both, jurisdictions heavily tinctured by Augustinianism--actually espouse a model indistinguishable from penal-substitutionary atonement (PSA), the composite model that modern Protestants have built atop the original teachings of Augustine and Anselm. (Yet other Eastern Orthodox understandings of Christ’s work on the cross are presented in Episode 69 of this series.)

Because Augustine and Anselm are venerated as doctors of the Catholic Church and because PSA’s prominent exponents bring with them impressive academic credentials, this lecture cautions the listener to approach theological authorities with discernment rather than veneration. Veneration of the physician Galen (circa AD 131-201) retarded the study of medicine until Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) proved by experimentation that Galen’s medical writings were wrong. This lecture applies this lesson to theology.

Run time: 13:14; Posted: 4/18/13
The Atonement Part 1‐‐The Medieval Model of Atonement (a) ▾︎
The word “atonement,” lexically defined, means “reparation for a wrong or an injury.” Because Christ’s death on the cross is widely understood to be a reparation for a wrong that mankind did to God, the term “atonement” has come to mean ANY theory answering the question, “Why did the forgiveness of our sins require the death of Christ?” This use of the word is unfortunate since the prevailing view among eastern Christians is that the death of Christ has nothing to do with reparation for a wrong or an injury. Nevertheless, for the sake of convenience, the restored-icon model is referred to as a “model of atonement” through the rest of this series.

Since the time of medieval Catholic thinker Anselm of Canterbury (AD 1033‐1109), the traditional answer that Catholics have given to the question, “Why did the forgiveness of our sins require the death of Christ?” has been that God the Father--his honor grievously insulted by mankind’s sins--delivers his own Son to suffer the penalty for that insult in mankind’s place. (Protestantism, the offspring of medieval Catholicism, adopts this theory lock, stock, and barrel, rebaptizing the theory “penal-substitutionary atonement” [PSA].)

By contrast, when eastern Christians face the same question, they typically respond that mankind is an icon of God that has become damaged. To repair this damage, God himself assumes human flesh, uniting the entirety of the human nature to his divinity. (Elaboration on this theory begins in Lecture 6.)

The current lecture begins our examination of the dogma of atonement as conceived by Anselm. Anselm's model of atonement comprises twelve claims--three derived from Augustine of Hippo (AD 354-430), nine postulated by Anselm himself. The first four claims in Anselm’s model read:
  1. Adam transmits the guilt of his sin to all his descendants (original sin).
  2. Original sin renders all men vicious and incapable of seeking after God (total depravity).
  3. Total depravity extends even to infants (infant depravity).
  4. Adam's sin and the resulting degradation of mankind infinitely offend God.
Audio clips from prominent apologists Ken Samples, John Ankerberg, and Randy Alcorn demonstrate that this mix of late-antique and medieval thinking is still afoot in modern theology.

Run Time: 22:05; Posted: 5/14/11 and 2/23/14
The Atonement Part 2--The Medieval Model of Atonement (b) ▾︎
This lecture continues our exploration of the dogma of atonement as formulated by the medieval Catholic theologian Anselm of Canterbury (AD 1033-1109). Having examined the first four of Anselm’s twelve claims in the last lecture, we now turn our attention to claims 5-8:
  1. Mankind’s guilt is to be understood as a debt that we owe God for having offended him.
  2. Not even infants are free from paying this debt to God.
  3. Incapable of paying this debt, mankind can only hope for its cancellation.
  4. But God cannot leave sin unpunished without offending his own sense of justice.
These ideas originate in medieval Europe and evince a crudely anthropomorphic conception of God. Astonishingly, even the most esteemed thinkers among modern Protestants--men like R.C. Sproul and James White--still profess this primitively naive theology, as audio clips from their sermons and debates demonstrate.

Run Time: 22:13; Recorded: 5/21/11
The Atonement Part 3--The Medieval Model of Atonement (c) ▾︎
This lecture examines the last four claims in Anselm of Canterbury’s model of atonement. Those claims read:
  1. God requires that mankind’s collective debt be recompensed in as painful a manner as possible.
  2. Only a God-man can satisfy all the demands of the debt repayment.
  3. The Son of God becomes incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth so that his human nature can be killed to satisfy mankind’s debt to God.
  4. Thus, Jesus sacrifices his humanity as a ransom to God.
Audio clips from Charles "Chuck" Swindoll, James MacDonald, and medical doctor Alex Metherell demonstrate that Anselm’s theories are alive and well in modern Protestantism.

Of note in our discussion, we posit that claim #9 lurks behind the western Christian fixation on the blood and gore of crucifixion, Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of the Christ” exemplifying this trait. You will hear an audio clip in which, remarkably, arch-Calvinist R.C. Sproul, Jr. takes the same contrary position on the blood-and-gore issue that the Eastern Orthodox take.

Run Time: 31:40; Recorded: 5/29/11

The Atonement Part 4--The Atonement School (a) ▾︎
Anselm advanced his model of the atonement in the eleventh century. His modern adherents have refined and elaborated this model, adding to Anselm’s ideas of dishonor, penalty, and substitution an additional five ideas. This lecture examines the first two of those ideas:
  • God instituted the Old-Testament sacrificial system because only bloodshed can recompense him for his stolen honor.
  • God pours out his wrath against our sins by punishing Christ, pretending that Christ is we, the ones who actually deserve to be punished (a greatly elaborated take on Anselm’s doctrine of substitution).
These modern-day followers of Anselm, a body of thinkers that our lecturer brands “The Atonement School,” include such names as:
  • Chuck Swindoll (host of “Insight for Living”),
  • W.O. Vaught (Bill Clinton’s late pastor),
  • Hank Hanegraaff (host of “The Bible Answer Man”), and
  • John MacArthur (host of “Grace to You”).
In this lecture, you will hear all of the above personalities articulating aspects of penal-substitutionary atonement (PSA), the model that has become the dominant understanding of Christ’s work on the cross--an understanding sharply different from the more ancient understanding generally held by eastern Christians.

Run time: 19:18; Recorded: 6/5/11

The Atonement Part 5--The Atonement School (b) ▾︎
This lecture outlines the last three of the Atonement School’s additions to Anselm’s medieval model of atonement. These claims are:

On the cross, Christ becomes a concentrated mass of sin.
God forsakes the crucified Christ, turning his back on him.
As the perfect, unblemished offering, Christ satisfies God’s wrath against sin, thereby obviating the need for any further blood sacrifice.

The blending of Protestant soteriology with Augustine’s and Anselm’s anthropology yields the composite model known as penal-substitutionary atonement (PSA). PSA is composed of the 17 claims that follow:
  1. Adam’s federal headship of humanity makes all mankind guilty of his sin. (Augustine)
  2. Thanks to the transmission of original sin, mankind is now totally depraved. (Augustine)
  3. Even infants, innocent of actual sin, are guilty of original sin. (Augustine)
  4. This sin, apparently so minor, infinitely offends God because the gravity of an offense depends on the status of the one offended. (Anselm)
  5. All sin is to be understood as a debt that we owe God for the crime of having robbed him of honor. (Anselm)
  6. Even infants owe God this debt. (Anselm)
  7. In the Old Testament era, God insists that this debt be paid by one’s shedding an innocent animal’s blood. (Atonement School)
  8. God could have redeemed man by the simple act of willing it. (Anselm)
  9. But God cannot forgive a sin without first punishing the sinner. (Anselm)
  10. Not only must the redemption mirror the fall, but it must also be as painful as possible since the fall was so easy. (Anselm)
  11. Only the death of a god-man is worthy to serve as recompense to God for his stolen honor. (Anselm)
  12. Christ becomes incarnate so that his humanity can suffer as a substitute for us. (Anselm)
  13. God pours out his wrath on Christ, pretending that Christ is we, the ones who actually deserve punishment. (Atonement School)
  14. On the cross, Christ becomes literal sin and a literal curse. (Atonement School)
  15. His eyes too holy to look upon sin, God the Father turns his back on Christ, abandoning him. (Atonement School)
  16. Christ dies on the cross as an unblemished sacrifice, thereby appeasing God’s wrath once and for all. (Atonement School)
  17. Thus, Christ’s death ransoms us from the wrath of God. (Anselm)
In this lecture, you will hear shocking audio clips of R.C. Sproul advancing claims #14 and 15 of the composite model by calling the crucified Christ a grotesque, obscene mass of sin that God the Father forsakes (a blasphemous distortion of Gal 3:13 and 2 Cor 5:21).

Run time: 17:27; Recorded: 6/10/11
The Atonement Part 6--The “Restored Icon” Model ▾︎
Among western Christians, the question “Why did the forgiveness of our sins require the death of Christ?” is answered by the model of penal-substitutionary atonement (PSA). The model is “penal” in the sense that God must punish mankind for the sin of our forefather Adam. The model is “substitutionary” in the sense that the Son of God becomes incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth in order to suffer the punishment in mankind’s place. The model is “atonement” in the sense that his death serves as reparation for the injury that Adam’s sin had done to God centuries earlier.

In Eastern Christian thought, the death of Christ is neither penal, nor is it substitutionary, nor is it even rightly called atonement. Rather, it is the assumption of the totality of the human condition in order to heal it.

The first part of this lecture clarifies the meaning of the western-Christian concept of “atonement” by providing both its lexical definition (“an act meant to correct, redress, or otherwise expiate a wrong or injury”) and its meaning in the context of popular theology (a catch-all answer for the question “Why did the forgiveness of our sins require the death of Christ?”).

The second part defines the eastern Christian concept of “redemption” (rescue from a state of sinfulness and its consequences) and articulates the restored-icon model, which states that the life, death, and resurrection of Christ serve as a process by which mankind is restored to a state of righteousness.

The restored-icon model consists of two main assertions. The evidence supporting the first claim--that human beings are living icons of God that become damaged by sin and must be restored--is drawn from Genesis and the Pauline epistles. Much of the case for the second assertion--that in order to heal mankind, Christ had to fuse every aspect of the human condition to his godhood--is derived from the famous insight of Gregory of Nazianzus: “For that which he has not assumed he has not healed; but that which is united to his godhead is also saved.”

Run time: 22:19; Recorded: 6/15/11
The Atonement Part 7—Augustine and His Partisans (a) ▾︎
The Atonement School’s first claim is: Adam’s federal headship of mankind makes all of us guilty of his sin. This revolting concept goes under the name “original sin” and comes directly from a treatise written in the fifth century by Augustine of Hippo (AD 354-430). Although the idea of original sin is traditionally rejected in Eastern Orthodoxy, many Christians venerate its originator, Augustine of Hippo, as a saint. Consequently, before we refute original sin, we must spend this lecture and the next examining whether Augustine is rightly called a saint.

Catholicism hails Augustine as a doctor of the Church. Martin Luther, founder of the German Reformation, began his career as a monk in the Augustinian order. John Calvin, founder of the Swiss Reformation, openly acknowledged his theology’s debt to that of Augustine. Thus, Augustine’s high status among Catholics and Protestants surprises us not at all. What does surprise us is the high status that this figure enjoys among a small camp within Eastern Orthodoxy. Despite Augustine’s originating the concepts of total depravity, unconditional election, the filioque, and infant damnation (all of which concepts are abominated in Eastern Orthodoxy), the two Russian-influenced jurisdictions of North America name Augustine a saint (demonstrably resulting from the inroads that Catholic missionaries made in Russia prior to the establishment of those jurisdictions).

There are, in fact, three schools of thought within Eastern Orthodoxy concerning Augustine. The first school, represented by such worthies as David Anderson and Kallistos Ware, name him a saint. The second school, represented by the prolific monastic writer Seraphim Rose, takes a middle road, declaring Augustine “blessed.” The third school, composed of such thinkers as the priest Michael Azkoul, declares Augustine a heretic. Our lecturer, Paul Vendredi, holds that only the third school can claim theological consistency.

Run time: 21:06; Recorded: 6/22/11
The Atonement Part 8--Augustine and His Partisans (b) ▾︎
The Catholics and Protestants composing the Atonement School owe much of their thinking to the theology of Augustine of Hippo (AD 354-430) because he directly inspired the theology of Anselm of Canterbury (AD 1033-1109).

In the course of this lecture, we will discover that modern Catholicism comprises two camps: Moderate Augustinians and Strict Augustinians. Paralleling this, modern Protestantism also consists of two camps: Reformed and Non-Reformed. Although Moderate Augustinian Catholics and Non-Reformed Protestants can boast some big names in their number, they play a comparatively small role in the Atonement School. Penal-substitutionary atonement is an Augustinian concept to its very core.

Any discussion of Augustine must also address such odd issues as “anti-language” (a phenomenon prevalent among cultists) and religious jargon. The previous lecture warned against one’s mindlessly mouthing pious locutions since these utterances can bias one’s thinking. The current lecture resumes that thread, cautioning that the term “original sin,” even when emptied of its meaning, has become a shibboleth. A Protestant whose confession of faith makes no mention of original sin may still feel obliged to curtsey before the term, so hallowed has it become.

Run time: 20:31; Recorded: 6/27/11
The Atonement Part 9--The False Dogma of Original Sin ▾︎
The first claim in the composite model of the atonement states that because Adam stands as mankind’s “federal head,” all human beings are guilty of his sin in the Garden of Eden. Theologians of the west call this the dogma of original sin. All Catholics--whether strict Augustinians or moderate Augustinians--believe in original sin. Indeed, the Catechism of the Catholic Church enshrines this as a mandatory belief (article 1, para 7, § 404). Original sin is also the majority view in Protestantism. All Calvinist Protestants believe in it and most non-Calvinist Protestants either believe in it or CLAIM that they believe in it.

The proof text most used to support this dogma is Rom 5:12. Amazingly, the Atonement School bases its argument NOT on the text of Rom 5:12, but rather on Augustine of Hippo’s interpretation of that text. This error in reasoning, known as the fallacy of hypostatized proof (when one mistakes a received construal of a text for the text itself), no doubt arises from the excessive veneration that western Christians afford Augustine.

This lecture consists of a close reading of Rom 5:12 and its surrounding verses. Comparing the original Greek underlying the text to the ambiguous Latin translation that Augustine used, this lecture demonstrates that Augustine (illiterate in Greek) misread the passage, thereby giving western Christianity the false dogma of original sin. Thus, this cornerstone of Catholic and Reformation theology comes not from the Bible, but rather from a quirk in the Latin spoken in the late-antique period.

That western Christians would accept an interpretation based on post-classical Latin rather than on the Greek of the original texts is all the more stunning when one considers what Augustine himself wrote on the subject of translation: "When some difference occurs in the two versions, where it is impossible for both to be a true record of historical fact, then greater reliance should be placed on the original language from which a version was made by translators into another tongue" (City of God, Book 15, § 13).

Run time: 24:21; Recorded: 7/6/11
The Atonement Part 10--The False Dogma of Total Depravity (a) ▾︎
“All people are conceived in sin and are born children of wrath, unfit for any saving good, inclined to evil, dead in their sins, and slaves to sin. Without the grace of the regenerating Holy Spirit they are neither willing nor able to return to God, to reform their distorted nature, or even to dispose themselves to such reform.”

That definition of total depravity comes from the Synod of Dordt, a conclave held in Dordrecht, Holland between November, 1618 and May, 1619. Total depravity is the first letter in Calvinism’s celebrated TULIP acronym and is the second claim in the 17-point model of PSA that we are examining. Indeed, total depravity and PSA form an inseparable grid: human corruption necessitates atonement because it has provoked God’s wrath.

In arguing on behalf of the restored-icon model and against total depravity, this lecture outlines a convergent series of three arguments:
  1. Everything created by God is good, both before AND after the fall.
  2. The Word of God assumes a human nature in the hypostatic union. If human nature is totally depraved, then Christ’s human nature is totally depraved, as well.
  3. The fact that all civilized societies recognize natural law disproves the notion that humanity cannot incline by nature to that which is good.
This lecture is the first of three articulating why the restored-icon school rejects total depravity. We elaborate on argument #1 in this lecture. We will address argument #2 in lecture 11; argument #3, in lecture 12.

Run time: 25:07; Recorded: 7/12/11
The Atonement Part 11--The False Dogma of Total Depravity (b) ▾︎
The classic Reformation creeds tell us that as a result of the Fall, mankind has become totally polluted in all faculties of both soul and body, a concept known as total depravity. Positing total depravity as the second claim in its 17-claim model of atonement, the Atonement School finds itself contradicting three Christological ideas that it militantly affirms:
  1. Christ is entirely God and entirely man.
  2. Neither nature is changed by its union to the other.
  3. Christ is without sin.
These three ideas compose what is known as the dogma of the hypostatic union. Since every member of the Atonement School believes both in the hypostatic union and in total depravity, they must explain how Christ’s unmingled fully human nature manages not to be totally depraved. The following syllogism makes this problem plain:
  1. All human beings are totally depraved as a result of original sin.
  2. Christ is a human being.
  3. Therefore, Christ is totally depraved as a result of original sin.
Because the syllogism follows the AAA-1 (Barbara) structure, the Atonement School cannot fault the syllogism’s validity. Because the syllogism’s premises consist of propositions affirmed by the magisterial Reformers, neither can the Atonement School fault the syllogism’s soundness. Therefore, they are reduced either to special pleading (Christ is somehow exempt from the universality of total depravity), Eutychianism (Christ’s human nature simply dissolves into his divine nature), or Monophysitism (Christ has no human nature).

Run time: 18:26; Recorded: 7/16/11
The Atonement Part 12--The False Dogma of Total Depravity (c) ▾︎
Non-Reformed Protestants espousing PSA have tried to salvage the untenable dogma of total depravity by watering it down into the notion of the “sin nature.” This theory posits that Christ manages not to inherit total depravity since he was born from a virgin. But as the lecture points out, the only way that Christ--whose human nature comes from his mother Mary--would not contract a sin nature along with the human nature that he got from her would be if Mary were also without a sin nature. Are the Protestants of the Atonement School now professing Mary’s immaculate conception, the peculiar teaching of their nemeses the Catholics?

While the Catholics of the Atonement School sidestep the Christ-is-depraved problem using their concept of Mary’s immaculate conception, they face their own dilemma. Anselm--the doctor of the Church whose claims form the basis of the PSA model embraced by modern Protestants and Catholics alike--explicitly rejected the immaculate conception in the book most foundational to modern atonement theories (see Why God Became Man Book 2, §16).

In the lecture’s second half, we present our third argument against total depravity. The Apostle Paul (both directly in his own epistles and as he is quoted in the book of Acts) teaches that all human beings--both regenerate AND unregenerate--have the law of God clearly written on their hearts. What is more, the unregenerate are actually capable of OBEYING this law (Rom 2:14-16). Therefore, total depravity cannot possibly hold.

Run time: 27:33; Recorded: 7/22/11
The Atonement Part 13--The Atonement School on Infant Depravity ▾︎
Building upon the theology of its forefathers, the Atonement School advances the concept of infant depravity as the third of its seventeen claims. Using statements from Anselm and Augustine, we have condensed the idea of infant depravity into this sentence: “Even infants, innocent of actual sin, are guilty of original sin and are therefore totally depraved.”

The revolting notion that a baby enters the world totally depraved and polluted in all aspects did not die with the passing of the medieval period. The Reformer John Calvin reaffirmed the teaching, and his modern exponents gleefully quote his reckoning of babies as “rats.” (Since the Atonement School deems babies depraved rats, one wonders why modern Calvinists oppose abortion.)

In this lecture, we refute the Atonement School’s use of proof texts like Psalm 51:5; Psalm 88:16-17; and such “sins of the fathers” passages as Exodus 20:5b; Deuteronomy 5:9b; and Jeremiah 32:18.

As a final nail in the coffin of infant depravity, the lecture notes that Luke 3:33 shows Christ descending biologically from Phares, the offspring of an incestuous union between Judah and Judah’s daughter-in-law Tamar. Surely descent from an incestuous union would render Christ totally depraved! Yet no Atonement Schooler calls Christ totally depraved. Atonement-School theology runs aground on one inconsistency after another.

Run time: 21:09; Recorded: 7/28/11
The Atonement Part 14--Augustine on Infant Depravity (a) ▾︎
Augustine saw that the Church baptized infants. From seeing that ongoing event, he inferred three claims by inductive generalization:
  1. All infants are baptized for the washing away of sin.
  2. Infant baptism is for the removal of original sin.
  3. No infants dying unbaptized are saved.
These three claims originate in his book On Merit and the Forgiveness of Sins, and the Baptism of Infants. All three claims are false. Nevertheless, we play devil’s advocate in this lecture, turning each claim into the conclusion of a formally valid deductive argument.

The first claim appears in this AAA-1 categorical syllogism:
  1. All persons who are baptized are baptized for the washing away of sin.
  2. All infants are persons who are baptized.
  3. THEREFORE, ALL INFANTS ARE BAPTIZED FOR THE WASHING AWAY OF SIN.
The second claim appears in this hypothetical syllogism, which is valid by modus ponens:
  1. If infants are free of actual sin, then infant baptism is for the removal of original sin.
  2. Infants are free of actual sin.
  3. THEREFORE, INFANT BAPTISM IS FOR THE REMOVAL OF ORIGINAL SIN.
The third claim appears as the conclusion this EAE-1 categorical syllogism:
  1. No unbaptized persons are saved.
  2. All infants dying unbaptized are unbaptized persons.
  3. THEREFORE, NO INFANTS DYING UNBAPTIZED ARE SAVED.
Does Augustine merit the time taken in this lecture to construct him a moot case? Most eastern Christians would say no. But we have constructed the best possible case for our adversary lest the subsequent lectures refuting infant baptism be accused of attacking straw-man arguments.

Run time: 23:20; Recorded: 8/6/11
The Atonement Part 15--Augustine on Infant Depravity (b) ▾︎
The first of Augustine’s three inductive generalizations concerning infant baptism is “All infants are baptized for the washing away of sin.”

This lecture weighs that claim in the balance and finds it wanting. The Bible teaches that baptism serves THREE purposes:
  1. Initiation into the covenant community (Colossians 2:11-13)
  2. Identification with Christ (Romans 6:3-5)
  3. Purification from sins (Acts 22:16)
Augustine’s argument fails because it assumes that there is only one purpose for baptism (purification from sins). In fact, this is the one purpose that does NOT apply in infant baptism since Augustine himself admits that children have no actual sin. Augustine’s enthymeme proves unsound, which is odd given that the grandees of Catholicism and Protestantism deem him the greatest thinker since Aristotle.

Equally curiously, Augustine’s theological descendants cannot decide whether infants should be baptized in the first place (R.C. Sproul and John MacArthur--both Calvinists--appear in this lecture taking opposite stances). Furthermore, the non-paedobaptist camp cannot agree on which villain introduced the “innovation” of infant baptism into Christianity. Some name Constantine the villain (instantiated by an audio clip of John MacArthur). Some name Tertullian the villain (instantiated by an audio clip of Walter Martin). Others prefer the safety of imprecision, simply blaming the Catholic Church (the favorite catch-all bogeyman for Protestant radio personalities).

Run time: 20:19; Recorded: 8/13/11
The Atonement Part 16--Augustine on Infant Depravity (c) ▾︎
This lecture concludes our refutation of the third claim in the Atonement School’s composite model of atonement: namely, that infants are depraved because they contract original sin. This claim is based on Augustine’s belief that infants are baptized to remove original sin, a belief resulting from his wrong assumption that purification is the sole purpose of baptism. In the course of refuting both the claim of infant depravity and the assumptions on which it is based, we pay especial attention to the fact that baptism also serves the purposes of initiation into the Church and identification with Christ.

Using the Bible (and even Augustine’s own arguments), we also show that infant baptism is for initiation and identification only, purification being inapplicable. Because infants are not fully functioning rational moral agents capable of incurring sin, they therefore have no sins to wash away. The ancient Christian practice of infant baptism has always been understood to be a means to initiate the child into the community and to identify him or her with Christ. It is only in the case of adults and older children that their baptisms fulfill the purification function in addition to the other two. The notion that infants need purification from sin is yet another of Augustine’s defacements of Christian thought and practice.

This lecture also addresses the thorny issue of baptism’s necessity to one’s salvation, whether one is an infant or an adult. Passages such as Mark 16:16 and 1 Peter 3:21 link one’s being saved to one’s first having been baptized. Thus, Augustine appears to have the winning hand at this point. However, Augustine assumes that God behaves in accordance with a wooden application of justice rather than an equitable one. Narratives from the Old Testament and the Gospels show that God administers justice equitably, not woodenly. Therewith, another of Augustine’s positions goes up in smoke.

Run time: 21:15; Recorded: 8/21/11
The Atonement Part 17--Reasonable Literalism ▾︎
The first three of Anselm’s nine contributions to the composite model of atonement read:
  1. Any sin, however small, infinitely offends God because the gravity of a sin depends on the status of the one offended.
  2. All sin is to be understood as a debt that we owe God for the crime of having robbed him of honor.
  3. Even infants owe God this debt.
Here, Anselm transgresses a principle that our lecturer refers to as “maturity in metaphor.” The biblical authors make abundant use of such literary devices as anthropomorphism, anthropopathism, metaphor, personification, and simile. Anselm’s reading these devices in the woodenly literal sense commits the fallacy of misplaced literalism. The harmful byproduct of this mistake in reasoning is Anselm’s concept of God as a thin-skinned medieval castellan whose serfs have provoked him. Such a being is not the immutable, impassible God of the Bible. Sadly, Anselm has bequeathed to the Atonement School (read: all of western Christianity) a decidedly mutable and passible God whom many moderns rightly reject as unworthy of worship.

This episode argues for the necessity of approaching the Bible with a REASONABLY literal hermeneutic. Doing so, one can disabuse oneself of the angry-God problem and, by extension, the dogma of PSA. We will also hear clips of conservative Protestants like Walter Martin conceding that a woodenly literal reading of the Bible renders it absurd--a rather odd concession given Martin’s militant insistence on the truth of PSA.

Run time: 20:28; Recorded: 9/18/11
The Atonement Part 18--Wooden Literalism (a) ▾︎
Because radicals in the academies have reduced Christ’s every utterance to the poetic metaphors of a sandals-and-beads proto-hippie, some Christians have swung to the opposite extreme in response, claiming that every word of the Bible must be understood literally. Both approaches are mistaken.

Wooden literalism (primarily a phenomenon among Protestant fundamentalists) produces three problems that were unknown in previous eras of Christianity:
  1. Biblical passages rendered absurd or unintelligible,
  2. A god that is changeable and, therefore,
  3. A god that is philosophically untenable.
This lecture looks at the first of those three problems. We also refute the common argument that one’s not using a woodenly literal hermeneutic makes one a liberal. To the Atonement School’s chagrin, our lecturer enlists some of that school’s most celebrated exponents to make this very point.

Run time: 20:04; Posted: 10/16/11
The Atonement Part 19--Wooden Literalism (b) ▾︎
“Theurgy,” a concept at the heart of occult systems like Kabala, states that human actions affect God. Counter-cult apologist Walter Martin says that theurgic concepts within Mormonism and Bahaism mark those systems cultic, since theurgy implies a mutable god. As great a thinker as Walter Martin was, he seems to have had a blind spot here. Martin militantly advocated for PSA throughout his career, never mind that that model is predicated on the need to placate a god who has been affected by mankind’s sin.

The previous lecture exposed how wooden literalism renders Bible passages absurd or unintelligible. The current lecture exposes two additional problems that wooden literalism produces. The first is a god that is changeable and, therefore, philosophically untenable (the very thing for which Atonement Schooler Walter Martin reproves Mormonism and Bahaism). The second problem is the dual pathologies of guilt-mongering and fearmongering. Guilt-mongering is the bailiwick of Catholicism; fearmongering, of Protestantism.

During this lecture, you will hear audio clips from a multitude of denominational perspectives:
  • Kevin Schaal (Independent Baptist)
  • James MacDonald (non-charismatic, conservative evangelical)
  • Clement Machado (Catholic)
  • R.C. Sproul (Presbyterian)
  • Walter Martin (Southern Baptist)
  • Larry Richards (Catholic)
  • John MacArthur (Independent Reformed)
We examine these perspectives in the light of eastern Christianity’s rejection of the angry-god thesis.

Run time: 32:42; Posted: 12/26/11
The Atonement Part 20--Divine Bloodlust (a) ▾︎
The composite model of PSA that we have been examining comprises seventeen claims: three from Augustine of Hippo (AD 354-430), nine from Anselm (1033-1109), and five from Anselm’s modern adherents, a group that we call the Atonement School. Claim #7 in this composite model is the first of the seventeen claims that comes from the Atonement School. This claim states that God instituted the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament because His wrath against sin can be appeased only by the shedding of blood.

A more precising statement of this claim can be laid out in five points:
  1. God’s wrath can only be appeased with blood sacrifice.
  2. God has required blood sacrifice from all men in all eras.
  3. God enjoys blood sacrifice.
  4. Blood sacrifice is an atonement transaction.
  5. The sacrifice of Christ is the final atonement transaction.
Today’s lecture concerns itself with point 1; points 2 through 5 will be examined and refuted in subsequent lectures.

Embedded in the claim that God’s wrath can only be appeased with blood sacrifice is the shocking idea that God hates mankind. This would seem to be false prima facie given such famous Bible passages as John 3:16 (For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life) and 1 John 4:8 (He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love). Yet audio clips from Presbyterian pastor Joseph A. Pipa, Baptist pastor John Piper, and Reformed pastor R.C. Sproul, Jr. prove that the grandees of the Atonement School do indeed profess this biblical absurdity.

This lecture dismantles the Atonement School’s woodenly anthropomorphic understanding of 2 Samuel 6:6-7 and Hebrews 9:22, questioning the wisdom of building a theology of wrath and temporal punishment atop narrative passages.

The weightiness of today’s topic notwithstanding, screaming presidential aspirant Howard Dean injects some needed levity into our proceedings at about their midpoint.

Run time: 28:04; Recorded 1/14/12

The Atonement Part 21--Divine Bloodlust (b) ▾︎
This lecture continues our look at the series of arguments that converge in the Atonement School’s seventh claim--that God instituted the Old Testament sacrifices as a means for men of that period to placate his wrath. The sub-argument for which this lecture makes a moot case states that God has required blood sacrifice from all men in all eras.

Playing devil’s advocate, we evaluate in chronological order the biblical passages adduced by the Atonement School to show that God has demanded animal sacrifices in every historical era. God demands blood sacrifice from mankind in:
  • The antediluvian era,
  • The post-diluvian era,
  • Job’s era,
  • Abraham’s era,
  • The Mosaic era,
  • The era stretching from Joshua to Christ, and
  • The era of Christ.
Setting modesty aside, we think that the Atonement School itself would be hard pressed to present a better case than the one presented in today’s lecture. In lecture #23, however, we will drop our devil’s advocacy and begin cross-examining this moot case.

Run time: 19:32; Recorded: 1/30/12
The Atonement Part 22--Divine Bloodlust (c) ▾︎
Our devil’s-advocate case for claim #7 concludes in this lecture as we examine the remaining three of the five arguments underlying that claim. Those arguments are:
  • God enjoys animal sacrifice (Lev 4:31).
  • Blood sacrifice is an atonement transaction (Lev 17:11).
  • The sacrifice of Christ is the final atonement transaction (Heb 9:22).
The Atonement School makes an extremely convincing prima facie case for the above arguments. One would be a poor advocate, indeed, if one could NOT make a convincing case from the Bible. Substantial portions of Exodus and Numbers and nearly the entire book of Leviticus concern nothing BUT animal sacrifices. Moreover, the text often tells us that God finds these sacrifices “sweet smelling.” And seemingly, the more animals that one slays and burns, the sweeter God finds the smell. For the first day of the annual Feast of Booths, for instance, God commands an astonishing sacrifice of thirteen bullocks, two rams, and fourteen yearling lambs (Nm 29:13).

In this lecture, you will hear audio clips from such usual suspects as James MacDonald and John MacArthur. But our most interesting finds come as we make a foray into the crazy world of televangelist Jack Van Impe!

Run time: 30:53; Posted: 3/10/12
The Atonement Part 23--The Scapegoat and Other Non-Bloody Offerings (a) ▾︎
“Because God hates us, we have to placate him with blood offerings.” So says the Atonement School.

Our task in this lecture is to expose the faulty presuppositions behind this mindset. We begin by showing the Atonement School’s commission of two mistakes in reasoning: the pragmatic fallacy (“cherry picking”) and the fallacy of semantical questions (affixing a happy term to an unhappy issue).

Then, by paralleling its claims with the competing heliocentric and geocentric models of the solar system current in the early-modern era, we show that this camp has constructed a faulty model that saves the appearances of biblical data at the expense of giving a true explanation thereof.

Finally, we define the theological concepts of essence and energies. Thereby, we show that “hatred” is merely a phenomenological description of what happens when human sin interacts with God’s energies.

Run time: 23:16; Posted: 5/19/12 (originally 4/20/12)
The Atonement Part 24--The Scapegoat and Other Non-Bloody Offerings (b) ▾︎
Leviticus 17:11 reads, “For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul” (KJV). Were this the only verse on the subject, the Atonement School’s case that the Old-Testament animal sacrifices took place in order to placate God would be made. To that camp’s chagrin, the Bible states that all the following non-bloody offerings or actions bring the same level of atonement as animal sacrifice:
  1. Flour offerings (Leviticus 5:11-13),
  2. Incense offerings (Numbers 16:44-48),
  3. Spoils of war (Numbers 31:50),
  4. Artwork (1 Samuel 6:3-8),
  5. Acts of lawful iconoclasm (Isaiah 27:9),
  6. Doing good deeds (Daniel 4:27).
An even more devastating counter example is the Scape Goat, which the Atonement School (bizarrely) tries to make into a type of Christ, even though the Scape Goat is spared death, whereas Christ is killed.

Finally, Christ himself says, “Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift” (Matthew 5:23-24). Since Christ tells us that one must be forgiven BEFORE offering sacrifice, then it is not the offering of blood that makes atonement; rather, it must be REPENTANCE that makes atonement. Therefore, neither the death of animals in the Old Testament nor the death of Christ in the New Testament can possibly be an “atonement transaction.”

Run time: 23:04; Posted: 5/19/12 (originally 4/20/12)
The Atonement Part 25—Temporal Punishment (a) ▾︎
This lecture continues our examination of the seventh claim in the composite model of PSA; that is, that God instituted the Old-Testament animal sacrifices because mankind’s debt to him must be paid in blood. Animal sacrifice is a type of temporal punishment that an “angry God” imposes on mankind.

Temporal punishment is the concept in western Christian (that is, Catholic and Protestant) thinking that God sometimes punishes individuals on this side of the grave rather than waiting to punish them in hell in the afterlife. Although the Bible does record instances of God’s temporally punishing individuals or groups, the instances are so rare that one’s establishing a theology atop those passages is simply hermeneutic foolishness. It is an even worse hermeneutic practice to base one’s theology on narrative events of extreme strangeness or rarity (the lawyer’s maxim states, “Hard cases make bad law”). In fact, the only purpose for God’s applying temporal punishment at all is to bring men to repentance and/or to save society at large from the consequences of gross sin. Temporal punishment has nothing to do with an angry God’s venting his wrath.

In our examination of this topic, we also draw illustrations from the life and music of Keith Green, Ricky Skaggs, Sharon White, and Chris Isaak.

Run time: 23:19; Posted: 7/14/12
The Atonement Part 26--Temporal Punishment (b) ▾︎
Continuing our examination of temporal punishment, we turn now to the story of Uzzah found in 2 Samuel 6:2-7. An inexhaustible sermon generator for Atonement-School exponents, this story tells of God’s striking down Uzzah after the latter touches the Ark of the Covenant. Although a surface reading of this story seems to show temporal punishment in action, that understanding actually originates in the Atonement School’s reading the story through a wrongly tinted lens.

This concept of one’s viewing the world through tinted lenses is called a paradigm. Religion is a paradigm, or, if you wish, a pair of glasses through which one views the world. Philosophy of religion is when one takes off one’s glasses and looks AT them rather than THROUGH them. When one has examined one’s glasses and, finding them wanting, replaces them with a different set of glasses, one has undergone a “paradigm shift.”

This lecture argues that once Catholics and Protestants undergo the proper paradigm shift, their theology of temporal punishment will also shift. In the process, they will also have to reject related concepts, such as the Catholic dogma of Purgatory.

Run time: 21:21; Posted: 8/5/12
The Atonement Part 27--Temporal Punishment (c) ▾︎
The wrong approach to biblical exegesis understands Bible stories in terms of threats, infractions, and punishments. This is the exegesis preferred by the Atonement School (witness their sanctimonious use of the Uzzah story found in 2 Samuel 6:2-7). The right approach to biblical exegesis understands that consequences are simply byproducts of human actions, regardless of the “phenomenal” language that the Bible’s authors use in framing the discussion. This is readily asserted by Atonement Schoolers like William Lane Craig when countering atheist mockery of biblical turns of phrase. Oddly, the same camp discards this approach when treating supposed examples of temporal punishment in the Bible.

It is not difficult to see that the Atonement School’s theology of a God who reacts mechanically to any insult to his honor yields western Christians a god unworthy of worship. Indeed, if the Atonement School’s interpretation of the Uzzah story is correct, then the god of the Bible is little better than the loathsome gods of Greco-Roman myth. We draw a comparison between the Atonement School’s god and the Roman goddess Minerva, who angrily transforms the beautiful Medusa into a Gorgon for an act over which Medusa had no control whatsoever.

Run time: 24:36; Posted: 8/26/12
The Atonement Part 28--Not Blood, but Oil, Bread, and Wine ▾︎
This lecture continues our refutation of the seventh claim in the composite model of PSA. The seventh claim states that God instituted the blood sacrifices of the Old Testament because mankind’s debt to him for having stolen his honor must be paid in blood. One of the sub-arguments for the above states that God has required blood from all men in all eras. In actual fact, Old-Testament worthies are far more apt to offer God sacrifices of oil, bread, or wine; or to honor him by erecting altars and memorial stones. This lecture’s first half proves this by a detailed examination of Genesis.

In the second half of the lecture, we confront the Atonement School’s atrocious misuse of the Cain-and-Abel story found in Genesis 4:1-17. Lectures 26 and 27 exposed this camp’s abuse of the Uzzah story in 2 Samuel 6:7, but its handling of the Cain-and-Abel story is even more shocking. A lengthy audio clip from a 1980 sermon by Chuck Swindoll shows this esteemed Protestant pastor splicing a made-up narrative into Genesis--and then presenting it to his congregation as if it were the actual Biblical text!

Paul Vendredi has found the Atonement School’s exponents consistently unable to distinguish between biblical narratives and the systematic theology that they have built around those narratives (a mistake in reasoning called the fallacy of hypostatized proof). This leads to seminary-credentialed preachers spinning their own yarns when their theology is found absent in the actual text. It also leads to the shock of one’s Protestant interlocutor when one forces him to read aloud the text from which he is arguing--the stories and lessons that he thought were present in the text are not there at all!

Run time: 25:27; Posted: 9/15/12
The Atonement Part 29--Not Blood, but Repentance, Praise, and Justice ▾︎
While it is true that the God of the Old Testament demands that animals be sacrificed to him, the same God is very prone to rejecting those blood sacrifices. Sacrifice becomes invalid when offered with the wrong intent, something we would not expect were God the legalistic bureaucrat envisioned by Anselm and his Atonement School. Plainly, God desires man’s becoming consecrated through obedience, not through mechanical bloodletting.

By contrast, God names three things that he NEVER rejects as sacrifices: praise, justice, and repentance. This belies the Atonement School’s notion that mankind’s debt to God can only be paid in blood. But what destroys that notion once and for all is that the Bible indicates that God actually ABOMINATES blood sacrifice. Evidence of this can be found in Isaiah, First Samuel, Psalms, Micah, Hosea, and the deuterocanonical book The Song of the Three Holy Children, from all of which works we abstract in this lecture.

Run time: 19:18; Posted: 10/4/12
The Atonement Part 30--The Symbols of Egyptian Religion ▾︎
Having shown in the preceding lectures that God abominates animal sacrifice, we must now explain why God demanded it in the first place. Contra the Atonement School, the answer has nothing to do with debt repayment. God institutes the first animal sacrifices as an object lesson, forcing the Hebrews to destroy the totems of Egypt’s gods. Thereby, Israel can cleanse itself from the idolatry in which it had been steeped for the four centuries during which it had sojourned in Egypt.

A vivid instance of this totem destruction is the Passover sacrifice established in the twelfth chapter of Exodus. God orders the Hebrews to sacrifice male lambs and smear the blood on the lintels of their doors, a sacrilege to the ovine god Khnum. In Egyptian thought, this ram-headed god created children’s life force on his potter’s wheel and watched over their childhood health. Thus, by killing a juvenile ram, the Hebrews are symbolically destroying the protector of Egypt’s babies, making way for the angel of death to kill all the firstborn of Egypt.

God states, “For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and AGAINST ALL THE GODS OF EGYPT I WILL EXECUTE JUDGMENT: I am the LORD” (Exodus 12:12 [emphasis ours]). The Passover is a sacrifice of iconoclasm, not a sacrifice of atonement. Since Christ is the Passover sacrifice of the New Testament (1 Corinthians 5:7), his sacrifice must also be one of iconoclasm, not of atonement. Indeed, the New Testament tells us this directly: “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8b).

Run time: 21:57; Posted: 10/30/12
The Atonement Part 31--Identifying the Pharaoh of Exodus ▾︎
As we continue with our refutation of claim #7 in the composite model of PSA (the claim concerning animal sacrifice), we turn to the task of identifying the oppressive Pharaoh described, but not named, in the book of Exodus. In this lecture, we posit that Ramses II is the Pharaoh in question. There are four reasons for this conjecture:
  1. The Bible says that Hebrew slaves built the store cities of Pithom and Raamses. The historical record shows that Ramses II renamed the delta city of Avaris to Pi-Ramesse Anakhtu.
  2. The Bible says that Moses and Aaron came and went regularly from audiences with the Pharaoh. The historical record shows that Ramses II dwelt in Egypt’s delta, where the land of Goshen was located.
  3. The Bible says that Pharaoh’s firstborn son died in the 10th plague. The historical record shows that Ramses II was not succeeded by Crown Prince Amunhirkepshef, but rather by his thirteenth son, Merneptah.
  4. The Bible says that Pharaoh’s chariot force was destroyed in the Red Sea. The historical record shows that in the seventeenth year of his reign, Ramses II suddenly turns from warfare to diplomacy--an expedient that one would expect from a leader left with no military options.
Lecture 32 will show how all of this relates to the first blood sacrifices that God requires of Israel.
The Atonement Part 32--Destroying the Gods of Egypt ▾︎
This lecture emphasizes the legal bifurcation that occurs in Exodus 32, the golden-calf incident. Prior to this apostasy, God had only demanded five sacrifices of the Hebrews:
  1. The original Passover sacrifice (Exodus 12:1-20) and its once-a-year commemoration (Exodus 12:21-28).
  2. The sacrifice of first-born male animals to commemorate the tenth plague of Egypt (Exodus 13:2, 12, and 15).
  3. The one-time sacrifice of young bulls at the foot of Mt. Sinai to mark the ratification of God’s covenant with Israel (Exodus 24:5-6).
  4. The once-a-year sacrifice of bulls, rams, and lambs at the ordination of Aaronic priests (Exodus 29:19-21).
  5. The once-a-year blood atonement for the altar of incense (Ex 30:10).
What one notices about these sacrifices is that they are comparatively few (three of them take place only once a year) and none of them has anything to do with penalties or substitutions. They are all designed either to cleanse the Israelites from their 430-year exposure to Egyptian idolatry or to remind their descendants that the God of Israel is supreme over the false gods of the heathens.

That state of affairs changes radically after Exodus 32 and will be the subject of the next two lectures.

Run time: 20:31; Posted: 12/6/12
The Atonement Part 33--The Aaronic Order and the Second Legislation ▾︎
When discussing the animal sacrifices of the Old Testament, one must distinguish between those established prior to the golden calf incident of Exodus 32 and those established thereafter. God establishes the animal sacrifices PRE-golden calf for the purposes of iconoclasm. Destroying sacred Egyptian totems served both to insult Ramses II and to debase the gods of Egypt in the eyes of the Israelites.

God establishes the animal sacrifices POST-golden calf as punishment for the Aaronic order’s allowing the golden calf to be worshipped. Since Aaron (who had been given a special priesthood) betrayed God by making the golden calf for the Israelites, God imposes a special punishment upon him and his sons: namely, the bewildering cycle of animal sacrifices described in Leviticus and Numbers. Since Aaron was willing to return the Israelites to the worship of the Apis Bull (represented by the golden calf), God arranges that Aaron and his sons shall have to sacrifice this totem animal on an almost daily basis. In essence, God is sticking Aaron’s face into the animals’ blood. (Necessarily, this lecture also distinguishes between the sacrificing Aaronic and the non-sacrificing Levitical orders, two priestly castes that even celebrated theologians like R.C. Sproul confuse.)

Midway through the lecture, Paul Vendredi offers an excursus upon the Lutheran heresy of Sola Fide. The laws laid down before Exodus 32 comprise a mixture of universal moral laws and non-universal rules concerning Hebrew racial identity. The laws laid down after Exodus 32 comprise the same mixture plus the punitive animal sacrifices. Passages in the Pauline corpus allegedly “doing away with the law” refer only to the punitive animal sacrifices and the rules concerning Hebrew racial identity; the moral law remains in force, as Christ makes very plain in his statements and parables.

[Erratum: At 16:38, Paul identifies the Didascalia Apostolorum as a work of the second century. In fact, it is a work of the third century.]

Run time: 23:41; Posted: 12/20/12
The Atonement Part 34--Israel and the Second Legislation ▾︎
“Second Legislation,” a term originating in the Church Fathers, refers to the punitive animal sacrifices imposed upon the Hebrews for their apostasy at the golden calf incident. Whereas the Hebrews must approach God with animal sacrifice, the Gentiles are exempt from this burden.
  • The Philistines may draw near to God with artwork.
  • The Chaldeans may draw near to God with good deeds and kindness to the poor.
  • The Assyrians may draw near to God by simple repentance.
  • The Persians may draw near to God with gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
  • The Romans may draw near to God by almsgiving and obedience to natural law.
An especially vivid contrast occurs when one juxtaposes Christ’s healing of a Jewish leper in Mark 1:40-45 and Elisha’s healing of a Gentile leper in 2 Kings 5:9-14. Whereas Christ sends a Jewish leper on an errand of blood sacrifice, Elisha does not require any sacrifice at all from a foreigner. Today’s lecture explains this situation as God’s object lesson for a stiff-necked, rebellious, and ultimately wicked people. In the process, our lecturer offers a brief excursus on Christian Zionism, a bizarre novelty claiming that God desires that Gentiles help the modern state of Israel re-establish the punitive sacrifices that the earliest Christians called accursed.

Run time: 26:29; Posted: 12/29/12
The Atonement Part 35--The Strict-Justice Theory Defined ▾︎
Having spent the last fifteen lectures explaining and refuting the seventh of the seventeen claims composing the composite model of PSA, we turn now to claims #8 and #9. These claims can be put together as one sentence comprising two clauses. Claim # 8 is the first clause: “God could have redeemed man by the simple act of willing it.” Claim # 9 is the second clause: “But God cannot forgive a sin without first punishing the sinner.” Thus, the whole sentence reads: “God could have redeemed man by the simple act of willing it but could not do so because he cannot forgive a sin without first punishing the sinner.”

The presupposition informing these two claims is the idea that because God is strictly just, his allowing any sin to go unpunished or any debt to go uncollected would derogate from his perfect holiness and justice. Our lecturer calls this presupposition the strict-justice theory. This concept is ubiquitous across both strict and moderate Augustinian Catholicism and across both Reformed and non-Reformed Protestantism. In short, the whole Atonement School accepts it. When applied, the strict-justice theory leads to four major errors.

First, if God’s strict justice requires him to punish every sin before he can be rendered propitious, then logic compels one to posit a purgatory-like state in the afterlife in which one’s unexpiated sins are finally punished. Otherwise, all persons dying with unexpiated sins (all of humanity, in other words) will go to hell at death. While the doctrine of purgatory spells no trouble for the Atonement School’s Catholic exponents, it spells theological disaster for this school’s Protestant exponents.

Second, the presupposition erects a false dichotomy between justice and mercy. In fact, God is neither strictly just nor all-forgiving; God is equitable (equitable meaning his justice is tempered with mercy).

Third, the presupposition requires one to believe that if God forgives anyone a debt, then God must recoup the debt from some alternate source (which, in the PSA conception, is ultimately through the death of God’s own Son). Not only does this fly in the face of at least three parables, but it also anthropomorphizes God.

Fourth, the defenders of the strict-justice theory are relegated to the extremity of hypostatizing sin. That is, they turn what is simply an absence of goodness into a living creature.

Run time: 17:43; Posted: 1/21/13
The Atonement Part 36--Strict Justice and the Problem of Purgatory ▾︎
The strict-justice theory avers that God cannot forgive a sin without first punishing the sinner. This has posed a problem for western theologians for centuries because the books of Genesis, Second Kings, and Revelation depict people either in heaven or being assumed into heaven. It is impossible that the persons depicted had led sinless lives because 1 John 1:18 states that if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. Why are these sinners not being punished in hell if God is strictly just?

To circumvent this problem, Catholic theologians posited “Purgatory,” a place between earth and salvation where God can punish otherwise good souls who left this life still sinning venially. Once the souls have paid for their sins in Purgatory, they can be admitted into heaven. Thus, a Catholic holding to the strict-justice theory (plank #9 in the structure of penal-substitutionary atonement) has a consistent theology. The clever, albeit heretical, dogma of Purgatory gives him cover. But for the Protestants of the Atonement School, there is no way out of this dilemma. Either souls are punished in Purgatory before being admitted into heaven, or God is not strictly just. Using audio clips from William Lane Craig, a celebrated Protestant exponent of the Atonement School, we construct a sorites illustrating the Protestant dilemma (pay particular attention to the final three premises):
  1. If God is the greatest conceivable being, then he must be absolutely just.
  2. God is the greatest conceivable being.
  3. Therefore, God must be absolutely just.
  4. If God is absolutely just, then he cannot allow any sin to go unpunished.
  5. God is absolutely just.
  6. Therefore, God cannot allow any sin to go unpunished.
  7. If God cannot allow any sin to go unpunished, then all sins left unpunished in this life must be punished in the afterlife.
  8. God cannot allow any sin to go unpunished.
  9. Therefore, all sins left unpunished in this life must be punished in the afterlife.
  10. All persons dying with unpunished sins are punished in the afterlife.
  11. All persons who die are persons dying with unpunished sins.
  12. Therefore, all persons who die are punished in the afterlife.
  13. If all persons are punished in the afterlife, then all dead persons are in hell.
  14. Not all dead persons are in hell.
  15. Therefore, not all persons are punished in the afterlife.
Run time: 16:25; Posted: 2/4/13
The Atonement Part 37--God Is Not Just; God Is Equitable ▾︎
This lecture concludes our examination of the Atonement School’s ninth claim: “God cannot forgive a sin without first punishing the sinner.” The previous episode demonstrated that this claim leads to the heretical doctrine of Purgatory. In today’s lecture, we add three more arguments to the convergent series undermining claim #9.

First, we adduce biblical evidence exploding the Atonement School’s false dichotomy between God’s justice and his mercy. In fact, God is neither strictly just nor all forgiving; rather, he is equitable. This can be seen plainly in the parables of the uneven debts, the unforgiving servant, and the Prodigal Son.

Second, we show that God does not need to recoup a sinner’s “debt” from an alternate source prior to God’s forgiving or healing the sinner. God simply forgives human sin because no human being can possibly steal from God--hence, no human being can possibly owe God anything.

Finally, the claim requires that one hypostatize sin. Remarkably, both Anselm and Augustine, the minds behind PSA, write that sin has no actual existence. Rather, sin is simply the absence of goodness, just as a hole in a shirt is simply an absence of fabric. Yet the Atonement School, whose soteriology is built atop twelve teachings unique to Augustine and Anselm, insists that sin is some kind of substance that must be mopped up from the world completely before God can be satisfied. As in the previous lecture, we provide numerous audio clips of the otherwise brilliant William Lane Craig spouting such nonsense in debate, notwithstanding the many lines of disconfirming data provided by his opponent.

Run time: 28:20; Posted: 2/19/13
The Atonement Part 38--“There’s Power in the Blood” ▾︎
In Why God Became Man, Anselm writes: “If man sinned through pleasure, is it not fitting that he should give recompense through pain? And if it was in the easiest possible way that man was defeated by the devil, so as to dishonor God by his sinning, is it not justice that man, in giving recompense for sin, should, for the honor of God, defeat the devil with the greatest possible difficulty?” (Book 2, § 11). In short, Christ must die by crucifixion because God demands that the metaphoric pound of flesh be extracted in the most painful manner possible. Thus, we have claim #10 of PSA.

The byproducts of this bizarre understanding of Christ’s death are horrifying. First, it means that the Catholics and Protestants of the Atonement School worship a god who is little more than a glorified dungeon master who tortures his own son (a stunning audio clip from Atonement Schooler R.C. Sproul instantiates this characterization). Foes of Christianity trade upon this absurdity, declaring PSA “cosmic child abuse,” an accurate charge that the Atonement School has never successfully refuted.

Second, Anselm’s claim turns the Gospel narratives into Quentin Tarantino-style “torture porn”; the professing Christian, into a cheering spectator thereof. Jesus Seminar co-founder John Dominic Crossan notes that if Christ has to die by the most painful means available in order to satisfy God’s wrath, then a Christian viewing Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of the Christ” has no choice but to cheer on the Romans who are torturing Christ since this is the means of the viewer’s redemption.

Third, claim #10 easily leads one into aphthartodocetism, a species of the Monophysite heresy that deems Christ’s body and blood divine rather than human. Catholic writings about the Shroud of Turin and Protestant admonitions to “plead the blood” make one especially prone to this mistake.

Protestant Gospel music is right when it joyfully proclaims, “There’s power in the blood!” While professors of the restored-icon model of redemption make the same proclamation, they reach this conclusion from different premises. The power of Christ’s blood stems not from its supposedly being divine, but precisely from its being ordinary human blood. The fusing of human blood to the Word of God’s divinity within Jesus of Nazareth is what heals our own blood and enables the icon of God within humanity to be restored. That is the REAL power of Christ’s blood.

Run time: 27:32; Posted: 4/9/13
The Atonement Part 39--Why Christ Had to Die by Crucifixion ▾︎
The Restored-Icon School and the Atonement School agree that in order for mankind to be saved, Christ must die by execution and not by natural means. The two camps also agree that the means of execution must be crucifixion, not any other means. That is where the agreement ends.

Drawing heavily upon the writings of Athanasius (AD 296-373), this lecture shows that the necessity of Christ’s execution by crucifixion has nothing to do with God’s supposedly wanting to exact from Christ the most punishing death possible. Rather, it is necessary for Christ to die by execution because his mission is to overturn “natural death.” His dying by natural means would have been completely inappropriate symbolically and actually. As for the manner of his execution, it is necessary that Christ be executed by crucifixion for three reasons:
  1. It proves his divinity, because he is able to rise victorious over the worst death his adversaries could impose upon him.
  2. Christ enters death high in the air, which Ephesians 2:2 identifies as Satan’s domain. Thereby, Christ shatters Satan’s control over the air, blazing a heavenward trail for mankind.
  3. The cross fittingly symbolizes Christ’s healing mission, mirroring the brass serpent that Moses raises up in Numbers 21:4-9 for the healing of the snake-bitten Hebrews.
Because Eastern Orthodox Christians often approach patristic sources with simpleminded credulity, our lecturer offers an excursus on the differences between the Christology of Alexandria and that of Antioch, exposing the sometimes overly Alexandrine Christology of Athanasius. The purpose of this side trip is to show that one must use discernment even when examining revered Church Fathers.

Run time: 27:55; Posted: 5/17/13
The Atonement Part 40--An “Infinite Finite” ▾︎
Claims #11 and 12 of the composite model of PSA read as follows:
  • The only commodity valuable enough to recompense God for his infinitely offended honor is the shed blood of a god-man.
  • Thus the Son of God becomes incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth so that his human nature can suffer and die as our substitute.
These two claims can be refuted singly on their lack of biblical evidence or be refuted together on the basis that the truth of one renders the other false. Consider: Christ’s infinite divine nature, being impassible, can neither suffer nor die. Therefore, it is his finite and passible human nature that must suffer and die as mankind’s proxy. However, God’s infinite offense must be satisfied by the sacrifice of an infinite being. How, then, can the death of a finite human nature satisfy God’s infinite offense? Here we have the oxymoron of the “infinite finite.”

In their attempts to avoid the self-contradiction of the “infinite finite,” Atonement School grandees like John MacArthur and David Jeremiah only make the situation worse by falling into such brambles as the Eutychian, aphthartodocetic, and theopaschite heresies. Necessarily, this lecture devotes much time to an examination of proper Christology.

Other Atonement Schoolers heard in this lecture are:
  • R.C. Sproul,
  • Jack Van Impe,
  • Norman L. Geisler, and
  • Robert Godfrey
Run time: 27:05; Posted: 5/26/13
The Atonement Part 41--Substitution Silliness ▾︎
This lecture continues our critique of claim #12--the idea that the Son of God becomes incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth so that his human nature can suffer and die as our substitute. Unfortunately for Anselm and his defenders, this claim does not even pass the laugh test.

Conservative Christians agree that the Bible neither contradicts itself nor yields absurdities. Yet claim #12 makes the Bible commit both of those mistakes. The claim plainly contradicts scriptures like Proverbs 17:15 (He that justifieth the wicked and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the Lord) and results in what our lecturer calls “Substitution Silliness.” For example, Ephesians 4:32 admonishes us to forgive one another “even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” But according to the substitution theory, in order for God to be freed from his sense of justice, he first has to kill his own innocent Son. Thus, if one is to forgive an offending person as God forgave us in Christ, then that means that one first has to kill an innocent person in order to be made propitious enough to forgive the offending person.

Furthermore, if by taking our punishment on the cross Christ thereby paid for everything that we have done wrong, then why does God have to punish sin a second time by sending sinners to Hell? That constitutes double jeopardy. The escape hatch that the Atonement School uses here, limited atonement, does not adequately account for verses such as John 12:32; 2 Peter 3:9; and 1 Timothy 2:3-4.

Finally, claim #12 impugns God’s character, claiming that he intentionally spills innocent blood in order to exonerate the guilty. In the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares, the householder instructs his servants not to uproot the tares in his field lest they also uproot the wheat in the process. The principle laid down in this parable--that the innocent should be protected--also conforms to principles of natural law and human positive law that Anselm and the Atonement School ignore. For example, “Blackstone’s ratio” states: “The law holds it better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent party suffer.” Yet the god of Anselm and the Atonement School intentionally kills the innocent, releasing the guilty with a verdict of “not guilty.” What system of justice anywhere would accept such a travesty?

Run time: 25:58; Posted: 7/2/13
The Atonement Part 42--The Suffering Servant (a) ▾︎
“God pours out his wrath on the crucified Christ, pretending that Christ is we, the ones who actually deserve to be punished.” So goes claim #13 of the composite model of PSA. This is the second of the seventeen claims that comes from the Atonement School, rather than from Anselm. Anselm certainly taught the concept of Christ’s substituting himself for us, but the Atonement School adds to it the idea of God’s actually venting his anger on his own son. Christ having gone to the cross to be our substitute, God may now chastise him with the punishment that is due us. The Atonement School infers this claim from a face-value reading of Isaiah 52:13-53:12, a text known commonly as the Suffering Servant passage.

By inferring claim #13 from the Suffering Servant passage, the Atonement School violates two hermeneutic principles that it scrupulously observes in other contexts. The first principle states that when interpreting a text, one may not ignore other texts on the same subject. The second principle states that no interpretation may be accepted if it renders a passage absurd. Claim #13 violates the first principle because it flies in the face of a number of passages that forbid the execution of the innocent in place of the guilty. It violates the second principle because it shows God expressing displeasure in the Son in whom he is well pleased--and even demanding that his Son’s innocent blood be spilled. Given that God will not pardon Manasseh for the innocent blood that that king spilled in Jerusalem (2 Kings 24:1-4), should we assume that God will subject himself to the same unforgiveness for shedding his own Son’s innocent blood in Jerusalem?

Run time: 23:30; Posted: 7/6/13
The Atonement Part 43--The Suffering Servant (b) ▾︎
As we continue our examination of the Suffering Servant passage (Isaiah 52:13-53:12), we turn our attention to Matthew 8:14-17. In this scripture, Matthew states plainly that Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled when Christ heals the sick and the demon possessed. Thus, the Suffering Servant passage pertains to Christ’s healing mankind, not to his being vicariously punished therefor. This is one of the rare instances where one Bible passage directly interprets another.

Because even advocates of the restored-icon model miss this obvious refutation of the Atonement School’s chief proof text, fairness dictates that we exonerate the Atonement School for also missing it. For that reason, the bulk of this lecture concerns itself with describing concepts that one must grasp before one can construe the Suffering Servant passage (or any biblical text) rightly. These concepts are seven in number:
  1. Paradigm (the set of assumptions coloring one’s interpretation of an event or explicandum)
  2. Saving the appearances (a construal that accounts for the explicandum without concern for other biblical data related thereto)
  3. Explanatory scope (the quality of an construal that accounts for all of the biblical data related to the explicandum)
  4. Inference to the best explanation (selecting the one construal that has explanatory scope while excluding any construal that only saves appearances)
  5. Active will (what God accomplishes by directly exercising his energies)
  6. Passive will (what God accomplishes by allowing others to act [even when they act evilly])
  7. Agent compression (when an employee is called by the name of his employer)
The Atonement School’s failure to grasp these seven concepts accounts for its wrong construal of the Suffering Servant passage.

Run time: 26:49; Posted: 9/1/13
The Atonement Part 44--The Suffering Servant (c) ▾︎
In this concluding lecture on the Suffering Servant passage (Isaiah 52:13-53:12), we apply to that scripture the seven concepts discussed in the previous lecture. Using the most quoted verses from the Suffering Servant passage as an epitome of the whole, we construe this much-abused section of the Bible in the light of Matthew 8:14-17. The result of interpreting the Suffering Servant passage with the right hermeneutic tools and not isolating it from the rest of the Bible is a passage that fits the restored-icon model, not the vicarious-atonement model.

This lecture also contains two excurses, the first addressing the propriety of Christian gun ownership; the second, the controversy between Catholics and Eastern Orthodox concerning whether the bread of the Eucharist should be leavened or unleavened. Though the latter controversy may appear to be an instance of hair splitting, the real-world consequences of using unleavened bread instead of leavened are serious, indeed.

Audio clips abound in today’s lecture. Among the personalities featured are skeptic Bart Ehrman; Protestants J. Mark Martin, James White, and Paul Washer; heavy metal band Testament; and failed presidential aspirant Howard Dean.

Run time: 31:14; Posted: 12/1/13
The Atonement Part 45--Christ the Reified Curse ▾︎
“Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree” (Galatians 3:13).

“For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Construing these two verses in the most woodenly literal manner possible, the Atonement School posits its fourteenth claim, which states: “The crucified Christ becomes a literal curse and the embodiment of sin.” This claim is so unbelievable, so patently blasphemous that people not regularly exposed to Atonement School theology doubt one’s truthfulness when one represents that as the mainstream Protestant position. For this reason, this podcast includes over four minutes of audio clips from Atonement School exponent R.C. Sproul making this claim on six different occasions. These are not slips of the tongue.

In our lecturer’s opinion, the most unappetizing of the seventeen claims composing the composite model of atonement are the five contributed by the Atonement School. In fact, the claim that God reifies the concepts of “sin” and “curse” in the crucified Christ is so outrageous that even Anselm (1033-1109), the originator of the medieval model of atonement, did not teach it.

Moreover, the Church Fathers who comment on Galatians 3:13 and 2 Corinthians 5:21 construe those verses in a manner completely unlike Sproul and company. Not one understands these verses to mean that Christ becomes a literal curse and the embodiment of sin. Rather, the terms “sin” and “curse” merely refer to the damaged human condition. Sproul’s understanding of these Pauline passages is a theological novelty (that is to say, a heresy).

In today’s investigation, you will probe such anonymous Christian works as the Didache and the Didascalia Apostolorum, as well as the works of Justin Martyr (AD 110-165), Gregory of Nazianzus (AD 325-389), Gregory of Nyssa (4th c. AD), and Ambrose of Milan (circa AD 340-397).

Run time: 26:47; Posted: 1/6/14
The Atonement Part 46--Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me? ▾︎
Matthew 27:46 and parallel passage Mark 15:34 record Christ’s crying out from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” According to mainstream Protestant thought, this indicates the point at which Christ--having become incarnate sin--is deserted by God the Father, whose eyes are too holy to behold sin. The idea that God the Father “turns his back” on the crucified Christ is the fourth of five claims that modern Protestants add to Anselm’s medieval Catholic model of atonement. The mixture of the Atonement School’s claims with those of Augustine and Anselm yields the composite model of atonement known as penal-substitutionary atonement (PSA). This “God turns his back on Christ” idea is the fifteenth of the composite model’s seventeen claims.

In this lecture, you will learn that Christ’s cry of seeming dereliction is actually a reference to a Psalm about a servant who, his suffering notwithstanding, is ultimately NOT abandoned by God. Hence, the proof text that the Atonement School uses to advance the idea of an abandoned Christ actually points to a Christ in full communion with his Father, even during the crucifixion.

Moreover, in John 8:28-29 and 16:32, Christ prophesies that though the disciples will abandon him at the hour of his arrest and crucifixion, the Father will yet be with him. These verses alone are enough to render claim #15 incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial. But for good measure, we also point out that claim #15 requires a divided Trinity--a theology unacceptable even among PSA’s most hardened advocates. Yet you will discover that these partisans cling to PSA even when it causes cognitive dissonance with their other most firmly held dogmas.

Throughout this lecture, you will hear audio clips from such usual suspects as R.C. Sproul, Sr.; R.C. Sproul, Jr.; Hank Hanegraaff; Paul Washer; and Paul Maier. But you will also hear from such unusual suspects as Gilbert and Sullivan and even Vice President Joseph Biden!

Run time: 33:41; Posted: 2/13/14
The Atonement Part 47--Christ the Lamb of God ▾︎
This is the first of two lectures critiquing the sixteenth claim in the composite model of atonement. This sixteenth claim states: “As the perfect unblemished offering, Christ satisfies God’s wrath against sin once and for all, thereby obviating any further need for blood sacrifice.” This claim creates decidedly less furor than the model’s other claims for the simple fact that this theology seems to be held by everyone in the Christian world. Even respected thinkers within Eastern Orthodoxy espouse this claim.

The professors of this theology fail to reckon with the falsity of the two presuppositions atop which it rests. The first of these wrong ideas asserts that all of the Old-Testament sacrifices prefigure Christ. In point of fact, only the Passover lamb prefigures Christ. The sacrifices instituted after Israel’s apostasy with the Golden Calf have no bearing on Christ and the New-Testament Church whatsoever, given that this “second legislation” was purely ad hoc and punitive.

The second of these ideas wrongly asserts that Christ, as the Paschal Lamb, represents the fulfilment of the young goat slain as a sin offering on the Day of Atonement. The obvious problem is that a lamb is a young SHEEP; a young goat is a KID. Christ is the Lamb of God (John 1:29), not the “Kid of God!” Additionally, the offering of the first Passover lamb is not a sacrifice of atonement; rather, it is a sacrifice designed to destroy heathen gods. The New Testament ascribes precisely the same purpose to Christ’s incarnation: “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8).

This lecture draws heavily from the Epistle to the Hebrews and from an anonymous work of the third century AD called The Apostolic Constitutions.

Run time: 28:33; Posted: 3/31/14
The Atonement Part 48--Christ the High Priest ▾︎
Claim #16 of PSA states, “As the perfect, unblemished offering, Christ satisfies God’s wrath against sin once and for all, thereby obviating any further need for blood sacrifice.” As we continue our refutation of this claim, we expand on our criticism that the Atonement School:
  • Confuses Passover with Yom Kippur,
  • Confuses sheep with goats,
  • Confuses anti-heathen iconoclasm with sacrifices of atonement, and
  • Confuses the priesthood of Melchizedek with the priesthood of Aaron.
The previous lecture covered the first three bullets in some detail; consequently, today’s lecture concerns itself only with the fourth bullet, emphasizing that Christ could not possibly be the final sacrifice of a priesthood that he deplores.

In the time of Christ, the Aaronic sacrifices were offered up by the Sadducee caste. But Christ ridicules this caste’s biblical ignorance; predicts the destruction of their temple and altar; and drives off the animals that they need in order to offer sacrifice in the first place, thereby threatening the caste’s very existence. Moreover, the Epistle to the Hebrews takes pains to note that Jesus of Nazareth descends not from the priestly tribe of Levi, but rather from the non-priestly tribe of Judah. Given all of this, Christ could hardly be the fulfilment of the Aaronic sacrifices.

Finally, Christ’s designation as a “priest forever after the order of Melchizedek” spells doom for the Christ-as-the-last-line-of-blood-sacrifices argument. The gifts offered by Melchizedek are bread and wine. That is the same sacrifice that God intended to be offered by the priesthood of all believers mentioned in Exodus 19:6. When God replaces this universal priesthood with the new Levitical priesthood (Numbers 3:11-13), he also replaces the sacrifice of bread and wine with the punitive blood sacrifices of the Aaronic order. But Christ’s ordination as a priest after the order of Melchizedek reestablishes the sacrifice of bread and wine. Christ makes this a perpetual sacrifice at the last supper when he identifies those elements with his body and blood.

Run time: 30:52; Posted: 5/4/14
The Atonement Part 49--Christ the Ransom (a) ▾︎
Perhaps the most straightforward of the claims that this series has yet examined, claim #17 in the composite model of atonement states: “The death of Christ ransoms mankind from the wrath of God.” Anselm and his modern exponents infer this claim from such New Testament passages as Matthew 20:28; Mark 10:45; and 1 Timothy 2:6, each of which labels the death of Christ a ransom. Further bolstering claim #17, the New Testament at several points refers to Christ’s offering himself up, handing himself over, or being handed over by some other agent (see Ephesians 5:25; Romans 8:32; and 1 Corinthians 7:23).

What the Atonement School does not admit is that none of the six passages cited names the person or thing to whom the ransom is paid. In point of fact, Christian thinkers from the earliest centuries have posited not just one possibility, but three: God, Satan, or death.

The most popular choice among modern Eastern Orthodox scholars is that God hands over Christ as a ransom payment to death. The liturgy attributed to Basil of Caesarea (AD 329-379) states this explicitly during that liturgy’s Anaphora (which explains the theory’s popularity among the Eastern Orthodox, who celebrate Basil’s liturgy ten times a year).

However, Basil’s brother, Gregory of Nyssa (AD 335-385), writes in his Great Catechism that God hands over Christ as a ransom payment to Satan. This theory prevailed until swept off the stage by Anselm’s book Why God Became Man, which advocated the ransom-to-God theory. Oddly, the ransom-to-Satan theory reappears in the theology of the modern Word-of-Faith movement, which has no discernable links to, or even knowledge of, Gregory of Nyssa’s writings.

This lecture rejects both theories. The remaining theory--that Christ hands himself over as a ransom to God--will occupy the next lecture.

Run time: 24:36; Recorded: 6/14/14
The Atonement Part 50--Christ the Ransom (b) ▾︎
Having examined the ransom-to-death and ransom-to-Satan theories in the previous lecture, we turn our attention now to the most popular understanding of the ransom, the ransom-to-God theory. This holds that Christ yields himself up in order to ransom mankind from the wrath of God. This theory was championed by such grandees of western Christian thought as Anselm (1033-1109) and such grandees of eastern Christian thought as Cyril of Jerusalem (circa AD 315-386).

Lexically defined, ransom means “liberation of a hostage by payment of some price.” What proponents of the ransom-to-God theory fail to reckon with is that the Greek word underlying “ransom” in such proof texts as Mark 10:45 is sometimes just a synonym for “rescue,” a word that does not connote one’s paying off a hostage taker. For example, a cognate of this word appears in the Septuagint translation of Exodus 6:6, which reads, “I am the Lord; and I will lead you forth from the tyranny of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from bondage, and I will ransom you with a high arm.” God did not have to pay the Egyptians anything to free the Hebrews, which means that “ransom” need not always be read in its typical sense of one’s paying off a hostage taker to free the hostage.

This lecture concludes by rejecting all three ransom theories. The ransom-to-death theory is wrong because it hypostatizes an abstraction. Death cannot receive a ransom because death is not a being; death is a condition.

The ransom-to-Satan theory is wrong because no creature can extort anything from God. In fact, this theory borders on blasphemy.

And the ransom-to-God theory is wrong because it assumes the false premise of Claim #5; namely, that God can be robbed of something and must be repaid.

“Ransom,” in biblical usage, means rescue or redemption. In earlier lectures, we stipulated that redemption means “to rescue someone from a state of sinfulness and its consequences.” Thus, passages concerning Christ as a ransom are best explained by the restored-icon model, which is a model of redemption, not a model of atonement.

Run time: 29:46; Posted: 6/21/14
The Atonement, Part 51--Atonement School Tactics (a) ▾︎
This lecture exposes five tactics that the Atonement School uses to propagate PSA while simultaneously silencing opposing views. Those tactics are:
  1. Projecting their own worldview onto their opponents (the fallacy of ethnomorphism)
  2. Offering as evidence the very thing they’re trying to prove (the fallacy of begging the question)
  3. Claiming apostolic origin for the medieval concept of PSA (stemming from the fallacies of tautological question and hypostatized proof)
  4. Equating rejection of PSA with liberalism (guilt by association)
  5. Equating rejection of PSA with approval of sin (forestalling disagreement)
This lecture contains over nine minutes of audio clips from such Atonement-School personalities as:
  • Steven J. Lawson (OnePassion Ministries)
  • R.C. Sproul (Ligonier Ministries)
  • John MacArthur (Grace to You Ministries)
  • Gary Chapman (Marriage and Family Life Consultants, Inc.)
  • Thomas Hopko (Saint Vladimir Theological Seminary)
  • Kenneth R. Samples (Reasons to Believe)
  • John Ankerberg (The John Ankerberg Show)
  • Walter Martin (Christian Research Institute)
  • Michael Youssef (Leading the Way Ministries)
  • William Lane Craig (Talbot School of Theology)
  • Anthony Carter (Southwest Christian Fellowship)
  • Derek Thomas (Reformed Theological Seminary)
You will even hear from actors John Hillerman, Jack Nicholson, and Raymond Burr!

Run time: 29:06; Recorded 7/20/14
The Atonement Part 52--Atonement School Tactics (b) ▾︎
However well prepared one may be to refute the Atonement School’s arguments for PSA, one may still be ill prepared to counteract that school’s massive media advantage. Because of the Atonement School’s omnipresence on radio and television, one must not only reckon with PSA, but also with a resulting Christian culture that has no idea that any model other than PSA exists.

Our task is to educate the public to evaluate all teachings by means of systematic doubt (a term originating with René Descartes, but which our lecturer calls the “Claus Von Bulow method”). Rather than simply appealing to the authority of such influential radio personalities as R.C. Sproul and John MacArthur, one must instead subject every one of the Atonement School’s claims and presuppositions to a battery of questions. By so doing, a disinterested evaluator will:
  1. Expose their bad scholarship by questioning their English usage,
  2. Expose their dishonesty by questioning their Greek usage, and
  3. Expose their hypocrisy by holding them to a consistent standard.
Today’s lecture covers the first item on the list. Lecture #53 will cover the remaining two.

Run time: 21:52; Posted: 8/7/14
The Atonement Part 53--Atonement School Tactics (c) ▾︎
In lecture 52, we explored the first step in our strategy of systematic doubt: exposing the Atonement School’s bad scholarship by questioning its English usage. In this lecture, we take the second step in our process: exposing the Atonement School’s dishonesty by questioning its Greek usage.

It is our lecturer’s position that most advocates of PSA are good men who are simply teaching what they themselves have been taught. Sadly, this is not the case with some of PSA’s most influential proponents. Outside of seminarians, few people in the English-speaking world have studied the Greek language. Aware of this, elites like R.C. Sproul knowingly exegete false theology from the New Testament, insisting that the underlying Greek supports their exegesis. In today’s show, you will hear Sproul repeatedly assert that the Greek grammar of Ephesians 2:8-9 requires one to believe “A,” trading on the knowledge that none of his partisans will check the reference. But when one actually examines the original Greek, one finds that the text requires one to believe “non-A.” Thus, R.C. Sproul, one of the most powerful voices for PSA, has been impeached as a witness and his credibility destroyed.

The third step in our process of systematic doubt is exposing the Atonement School’s hypocrisy by holding its exponents to a consistent standard. If the seventeen claims of PSA are true, then then those claims should be true regardless of what person professes them. For example, claim #14 states: “On the cross, Christ becomes a literal curse and the embodiment of sin.” Hank Hanegraaff, a self-appointed arbiter of theological purity, allows his friend and mentor R.C. Sproul to profess claim #14 with impunity. But when televangelist Benny Hinn professes precisely the same theology, Hanegraaff subjects Hinn to withering ridicule.

One fast discovers that the Atonement School is less interested in systematic consistency than it is in protecting its celebrity exponents. The claims of PSA are acceptable when coming from “reputable” sources like R.C. Sproul and James MacDonald. But the same claims are unacceptable when coming from “disreputable” sources like Benny Hinn and Neil T. Anderson.

Any system perpetuating itself by dishonesty and hypocrisy should be discarded. PSA is a system perpetuating itself by dishonesty and hypocrisy. Therefore, PSA should be discarded.

Run time: 26:13; Posted: 08/12/14
The Atonement Part 54--Moot Court (a) ▾︎
A moot court is an imaginary trial where third-year law students argue for and against a given case. The next fifteen lectures will be a moot court session in which we try penal-substitutionary atonement (PSA). In lectures 54-57, Paul Vendredi plays devil’s advocate for this model, summarizing PSA’s seventeen claims by playing audio clips from the model’s adherents. Today’s lecture reviews claims 1-4. Those claims are:
  1. Because Adam is mankind’s federal head, all mankind is guilty of the sin that Adam committed in the Garden of Eden (the shorthand for this is “original sin”).
  2. As a result of original sin, all mankind is now totally depraved.
  3. Even infants, innocent of actual sin, are guilty of original sin and are totally depraved.
  4. Any sin, no matter how slight, infinitely offends God because the gravity of sin depends on the status of the one offended.
The personalities making the case for the above claims are:
  • Harold E. (Hal) Brunson, Jr. (First Baptist Church of Parker Texas)
  • George Cronk (Orthodox Church of the Holy Resurrection)
  • Phil Johnson (Grace to You Ministries)
  • John MacArthur (Grace to You Ministries)
  • Albert Mohler (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary)
  • John Piper (Desiring God Ministries)
  • Fazale Rana (Reasons to Believe)
  • Kenneth R. Samples (Reasons to Believe)
  • Steve Sheele (Reasons to Believe)
  • R.C. Sproul, Jr. (Highlands Ministries)
  • R.C. Sproul, Sr. (Ligonier Ministries)
  • James R. White (Alpha and Omega Ministries)
Run time: 29:50; Posted: 09/28/14
The Atonement Part 55--Moot Court (b) ▾︎
As we continue our summary hearing on the seventeen claims of PSA, we now allow the Atonement School to lay out its own case for claims #5-9. Those claims read:
  • All sin is to be understood as a debt that mankind owes God for having robbed him of honor.
  • Even infants owe God this debt.
  • God instituted the Old-Testament animal sacrifices because mankind’s debt to him has to be paid in blood.
  • God could have cancelled mankind’s debt simply by willing it.
  • But God is strictly just. Leaving any sin unpunished or any debt uncollected would derogate from God’s holiness and justice. Therefore, God cannot forgive a sin without first punishing the sinner.
Alphabetically listed, the Atonement-School personalities defending the above theses on today’s podcast are:
  • Voddie Baucham (Voddie Baucham Ministries)
  • Krista Bontrager (Reasons to Believe)
  • Harold E. (Hal) Brunson, Jr. (First Baptist Church of Parker Texas)
  • Anthony Carter (Southwest Christian Fellowship)
  • William Lane Craig (Reasonable Faith)
  • Mark Driscoll (Mars Hill Church)
  • Warren A. Gage (Knox Theological Seminary)
  • Michael A.G. Haykin (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary)
  • John Pittman Hey (Grace Bible Church)
  • Sam Lamerson (Knox Theological Seminary)
  • Steven J. Lawson (OnePassion Ministries)
  • John MacArthur (Grace to You Ministries)
  • James MacDonald (Walk in the Word)
  • Joseph A. Pipa (Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary)
  • John Piper (Desiring God Ministries)
  • Hugh Ross (Reasons to Believe)
  • Kenneth R. Samples (Reasons to Believe)
  • Steve Sheele (Reasons to Believe)
  • R.C. Sproul, Jr. (Highlands Ministries)
  • R.C. Sproul, Sr. (Ligonier Ministries)
  • Charles R. (Chuck) Swindoll (Insight for Living)
  • Derek Thomas (Reformed Theological Seminary)
  • Paul Washer (HeartCry Missionary Society)
  • James R. White (Alpha and Omega Ministries)
  • Michael Youssef (Leading the Way)
Run time: 29:06; Posted: 10/12/14
The Atonement Part 56--Moot Court (c) ▾︎
In this session of the moot court, we allow the Atonement School to lay out its own case for claims #10-14 of PSA. Those claims read:
  • Christ must die by crucifixion so that the atonement can mirror the fall of Adam at a tree; so that the atonement can be as painful as possible, since the fall was as painless as possible; and so that the Christ can be cursed by God.
  • Because its debt is an infinite debt owed to an infinite being, mankind cannot satisfactorily pay its debt. The only commodity valuable enough to recompense God for his stolen honor, to appease his wrath against sin, and to render him propitious, is the shed blood of a god-man.
  • Therefore, the Son of God becomes incarnate so that his human nature can suffer the infinite penalty as our substitute. Thereby, God can satisfy his own wrath.
  • God pours out his wrath and all the torments of Hell upon the crucified Christ, imputing Christ’s righteousness to mankind and mankind’s wickedness to Christ. Thereby, man becomes positionally righteous; Christ, positionally wicked. But in reality, mankind remains wicked; the imputation is merely a legal declaration.
  • The wickedness of all humanity having been imputed to him, the crucified Christ becomes a literal curse and the embodiment of sin.
Personalities appearing on today’s podcast include:
  • Theodore Book (Totus Tuus Catholic Radio)
  • Ligon Duncan (Reformed Theological Seminary)
  • Robert Godfrey (Westminster Seminary)
  • David Jeremiah (Turning Point Radio)
  • Walter Martin (Christian Research Institute)
  • Lee Webb (Ligonier Ministries)
  • Jeff Zweerink (Reasons to Believe)
Run time: 25:56; Posted: 11/09/14
The Atonement Part 57--Moot Court (d) ▾︎
In this session of the moot court, the Atonement School finishes its summary case for PSA, arguing for claims #15-17. Those claims read:
  • His eyes too holy to look upon sin, God judges Christ, turns his back on Christ, and drives Christ out of the Trinity.
  • As the perfect, unblemished offering, Christ fulfils and obviates the entire Old-Testament sacrificial system once and for all. Thereby, any liturgical or sacrificing priesthood is abolished, as symbolized by the tearing of the temple’s veil.
  • The death of Christ pays in full for all the sins of mankind--past, present, and future--thereby ransoming mankind from the wrath of God.
In addition to the usual suspects, the personalities appearing on today’s podcast include erratic televangelist Jack Van Impe and the widely beloved D. James Kennedy, founder of Coral Ridge Ministries.

Run time: 24:51; Posted: 12/21/14
The Atonement Part 58--Moot Court (e) ▾︎
The Atonement School having completed its summary case for penal-substitutionary atonement (PSA), the Restored-Icon School now begins its summary refutation thereof, opening with claims #1 and #2.

Claim #1 (“original sin”) is false, having arisen not from the Bible, but rather from Augustine of Hippo’s misreading of the Bible (specifically, Romans 5:12-21). Even more fatally for claim #1, the Bible explicitly states in several places that no one may lawfully be held guilty for the sins of his ancestors or kinsmen.

Claim #2 (“total depravity”) is false first because mankind is able to discern and obey natural law, which would be impossible if mankind were dead in sin and totally depraved in all faculties of mind and will. Second, if mankind were completely wicked, then Christ would be completely wicked because he has a fully human nature. Third, the Bible itself calls men righteous and explicitly calls men to seek after God.

This lecture distills six previous lectures (episodes 7-12) down to their irreducible minimum, giving the listener an arsenal of proof texts against original sin and total depravity.

Run time: 23:22; Posted: 12/26/14
The Atonement Part 59--Moot Court (f) ▾︎
The Restored-Icon School continues its case against the Atonement School, now refuting claims #3 and #4 of PSA.

Claim #3 (“infant depravity”) is false because Anselm, Augustine, and the Atonement School have merely applied their discredited notions of depravity to infants. If the concept of total depravity is false with regard to adults, then perforce it is false when applied to infants.

Claim #4 (“sin infinitely offends God”) is false because it anthropomorphizes God in the same way as occult systems like Kabala. In reality, God is immovable, completely untouched by human actions.

This lecture distills four previous lectures (episodes 13-16) down to their irreducible minimum, providing the listener with a powerful outline to use against those arguing on behalf of infant depravity and the un-American, unbiblical notion that high-status persons merit more justice than low-status persons.

Run time: 19:54; Posted: 1/11/15
The Atonement Part 60--Moot Court (g) ▾︎
This session of the moot court summarizes the arguments marshalled in previous episodes against claims #5 and 6 of the composite model of PSA.

Claim #5 (“sin is a debt that we owe God”) is false because it relies on woodenly anthropomorphic readings of passages like Malachi 3:8-9 (“Wherein have we robbed [God]? In tithes and Offerings”) while not accounting for passages like Psalm 50:10-12, which clearly states that God cannot be robbed of anything.

Claim #6 (“the sins of the fathers pass on to their children”) falls onto the same sword of misplaced literalism as claim #5. Jeremiah, a prophet fond of this “sins of the fathers” locution, also writes: “But every one shall die for his own iniquity: every man that eateth the sour grape, his teeth shall be set on edge” (Jeremiah 31:30). Thus, children are innocent of their parents’ sins, owing God no debt.

This lecture distills three previous lectures (episodes 17-19) down to their irreducible minimum. You will learn how claim #5 drags the God of the Bible down to the level of the Olympian gods. You will also discover how maintaining systematic consistency with claim #6 would force such Atonement School exponents as R.C. Sproul and D. James Kennedy to endorse abortion.

Run time: 21:00; Posted: 1/24/15
The Atonement Part 61--Moot Court (h) ▾︎
This is the first of three moot court sessions summarizing the arguments against claim #7 of PSA. Claim #7 states: “God instituted the Old-Testament animal sacrifices because our debt to him must be paid in blood.”

This claim fails to distinguish between the original, very limited set of animal sacrifices prior to the golden-calf incident, and the extensive array of animal sacrifices imposed on Israel after the golden-calf incident.

The six animal sacrifices ordained prior to the golden-calf incident served entirely as iconoclasm against the false ovine and bovine gods of Egypt. The sacrifices symbolically destroying the sheep gods are:
  1. The Passover sacrifice of Exodus 12.
  2. The once-a-year commemoration of the Passover sacrifice.
  3. The sacrifice of first-born male animals to commemorate the tenth plague of Egypt.
The sacrifices symbolically destroying the bull gods are:
  1. The one-time sacrifice of young bulls at the foot of Mt. Sinai to mark the ratification of God’s covenant with Israel.
  2. The sacrifice of bulls, rams, and lambs at the ordination of Aaronic priests.
  3. The once-a-year sacrifice of a bullock to atone for the altar of incense.
The purpose of the sacrifices post-Exodus 32 is to punish Aaron and his sons for their role in the golden-calf apostasy and to punish the rank-and-file of Israel for brow-beating the priests into making the calf in the first place.

Run time: 17:29; Posted: 2/7/15
The Atonement Part 62--Moot Court (i) ▾︎
Undergirding claim #7 are six sub-claims, the first three of which we will summarily refute in this moot court session, saving the remaining three for the next session.

Sub-claim #1 states: “God hates us and wants to kill us.” As risible as this claim sounds, the Atonement School can actually build a formidable prima facie case for it by stringing together a number of verses taken mostly from the Old Testament. Notable among these verses is Psalm 5:5--“The foolish shall not stand in thy sight: thou hatest all workers of iniquity.” While the Atonement School’s woodenly literal interpretation of this passage saves its appearances, it does not account for passages like 1 John 4:16--“And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.” The Restored-Icon School reconciles these verses by understanding statements about God’s “hatred” to be phenomenological language. When human sin interacts with the divine energies, the resulting catastrophe appears to the onlookers to be the result of God’s wrath or hatred.

Sub-claim #2 states: “To appease God’s hatred, we have to kill animals as proxies for ourselves.” While there is much data to refute this claim, today’s lecture confines itself to the story of Balaam’s donkey. In this bizarre event from the twenty-second chapter of Numbers, the Angel of the Lord explicitly tells Balaam that he would have killed Balaam for the sin that he (Balaam) was committing, but would have spared the innocent donkey. Balaam must pay for his own sin; an animal proxy cannot do it for him.

Sub-claim #3 states: “When we fail to appease God with blood, or when we displease him in some other way, he inflicts temporal punishment on us.” We undermine this doctrine of temporal punishment by showing that even the Atonement School’s own grandees cannot apply it consistently. In an audio clip dated 2004, R.C. Sproul, Jr. describes human suffering as punishment from God. But in an audio clip dated 2014, the same man cautions against one’s seeing suffering as divine punishment. This about-face makes sense when one learns that in the ten years between those statements, Sproul’s wife died, his daughter died, and he himself came down with cancer.

We count R.C. Sproul, Jr. among our “usual suspects.” But we will also hear from two unusual suspects: tabloid journalist Geraldo Rivera and washed-up heavyweight boxer Mitch (Blood) Green.

Run time: 23:31; Posted: 2/15/15
The Atonement Part 63--Moot Court (j) ▾︎
This session of the moot court concludes the refutation of claim #7 by examining its remaining three sub-claims.

Sub-claim #4 states, “God has demanded blood sacrifice from all men in all eras.” This claim is the product of biblical illiteracy. Only in the Mosaic era does God demand blood sacrifice. When blood sacrifices occur in other eras, they are either free-will offerings (such as Noah’s sacrifice upon exiting the ark) or are offered up punitively (such as the burnt offerings offered up by Job’s three friends).

Sub-claim #5 states, “God enjoys blood sacrifice.” This is also wrong. What God finds sweet smelling is not the spilled blood or the burning carcass, but rather the obedience of the one making the offering. This is clear in the words of the Prophet Samuel as recorded in 1 Samuel 15:22 (“To obey is better than sacrifice”). This is also the opinion of the Church Fathers Athanasius and Irenaeus.

Sub-claim #6 states, “Blood sacrifice is an atonement transaction,” a claim based on Leviticus 17:11 and Hebrews 9:22. The Atonement School leans upon these two verses as proof that animals served as proxies for human beings in the Old Testament and that the New-Testament sacrifice is also a punishment by proxy. In reality, these two passages are examples of the literary device of hyperbole. If these two passages are to be read in their woodenly literal sense, then the Bible contradicts itself because the Old Testament abounds with non-bloody sacrifices that make atonement (including sacrifices enumerated in the Book of Leviticus). This lecture unearths no fewer than nine instances of non-bloody atonement, rendering subclaim #6 completely incredible.

Run time: 25:41; Posted: 2/28/15
The Atonement Part 64--Moot Court (k) ▾︎
This moot court session summarily refutes claims #8-11 in the composite model of PSA.

Claim #8, the claim that God could have dealt with sin in any manner that pleased him, is the only one of the seventeen claims with which the Restored-Icon School agrees.

Claim #9, that God cannot forgive a sin without first punishing the sinner, supposes that God can be robbed and that God is strictly just, both of which notions are false.

Claim #10, that the atoning sacrifice must die by crucifixion so that the atonement can be as painful as possible, is non-sequitur and warps the Gospel narratives into “torture porn.”

Claim #11, that the only commodity valuable enough to recompense God for his offended honor is the shed blood of a God-man, is wrong for two reasons. First, it assumes that human sin harms God, when in fact human sin harms human beings. Second, such Church Fathers as Clement of Alexandria tell us that the Bible merely uses the idea of divine wrath to scare readers into behaving rightly.

Run time: 23:34; Posted: 3/8/15
The Atonement Part 65--Moot Court (l) ▾︎
This moot court session summarily refutes claim #12 in the composite model of atonement. This claim states: “The Son of God becomes incarnate so that his human nature can suffer the infinite penalty as our substitute. Thereby, God can satisfy his own wrath.” The three concepts subsumed hereunder are:
  1. Substitution,
  2. Infinite Punishment, and
  3. God’s satisfaction of his own wrath.
Claim #12, a cornerstone in both the medieval and modern concepts of PSA, begins crumbling the moment one holds it up to other claims made by the Atonement School. For example, you will hear Atonement Schooler D. James Kennedy decry abortion as “the very antithesis of justice” because rapists are allowed to go free while the children conceived in rape are killed in abortion. Yet this is precisely the kind of atonement transaction envisioned by claim #12: we the guilty are allowed to go free while the innocent Christ is killed in our place.

This lecture distills two previous lectures (episodes 40 and 41) down to their irreducible minimum, exposing PSA for the risible mess that it is. As an added bonus, you will get a behind-the-scenes peek into how Paul and Teri record the patristic writings heard during the intermissions on Cathedral School.

Run time: 31:49; Posted: 4/4/15
The Atonement Part 66--Moot Court (m) ▾︎
This moot court session summarily refutes claims #13 and 14 of PSA. Both of these claims are modern accretions to Anselm’s medieval model of atonement.

Claim #13, in which the Atonement School infers “double imputation” and “positional righteousness” from Isaiah 53, is likely the biggest hermeneutic dumpster fire in the history of heresy. The very school of thought insisting on the maxim “the Bible interprets the Bible” ignores Matthew 8:14-17, which quotes Isaiah 53 and then states that said passage is fulfilled when Christ heals the sick and frees them from demonic possession. The Atonement School’s own hermeneutic principle forecloses any possibility that Isaiah 53 is fulfilled in some vicarious punishment.

Were that not enough, inferring PSA from Isaiah 53 violates yet another hermeneutic rule that Atonement Schoolers affirm elsewhere. That rule states: when there are two passages on the same topic--one passage clear; the other, unclear--the clear passage is the controlling passage. Double imputation is but one interpretation accommodated by Isaiah 53, a passage sufficiently vague to accommodate multiple working hypotheses. However, a number of other verses on imputation entertain no such latitudinarianism. For example:
  • “He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the LORD” (Proverbs 17:15).
  • “Also to punish the just is not good, nor to strike princes for equity” (Proverbs 17:26).
  • “He that saith unto the wicked, Thou are righteous; him shall the people curse, nations shall abhor him” (Proverbs 24:24)
The Atonement School’s interpretation of Isaiah 53 is destroyed.

Claim #14, considerably less complicated than #13, states that the crucified Christ becomes a literal curse and the embodiment of sin, an inference that the Atonement School draws from Galatians 3:13 and 2 Corinthians 5:21. Sadly for the Atonement School, this construal is at odds with that of the early Christians who commented on those passages. Gregory of Nazianzus (AD 325-389), Theodoret (AD 393 to circa 457), and Basil of Caesarea (AD 329-379) all understand the words “curse” and “sin” as figures of speech not to be taken literally. Other Church Fathers (Gregory of Nyssa [4th century] and Ambrose of Milan [AD 340-397]) write that “sin” and “curse” simply refer to the damaged human condition.

Run time: 23:32; Posted: 4/26/15
The Atonement Part 67--Moot Court (n) ▾︎
This moot court session summarily refutes claims #15 and 16 of PSA. As were #13 and #14, both of these claims are modern accretions to Anselm’s medieval model of atonement.

Claim #15, “God turns his back on the crucified Christ,” is blasphemy, requiring a division in the Trinity. The Trinity is indivisible, an assertion that even the Atonement School (inconsistently) affirms. Moreover, Christ says in John 8:28-29 and 16:32 that God will be with him at the crucifixion. Most strikingly, the crucified Christ quotes Psalm 22, a text in which the Psalmist exults in God’s NOT hiding his face from the suffering servant.

Claim #16 declares Christ the fulfilment of the entire Old-Testament sacrificial system. In reality, Christ fulfils only the sacrifice of the Passover lamb; the other sacrifices of the Old Testament serve either as anti-Egyptian iconoclasm, punishment of the Aaronic priests, or punishment of the rank-and-file Israelite.

Run time: 26:50; Posted: 5/23/15
The Atonement Part 68--Moot Court (o) ▾︎
This final moot court session summarily refutes PSA’s seventeenth claim, “The death of Christ ransoms us from the wrath of God.” Were one to give a more precising description of this claim, one could divide the claim into three parts:
  1. The death of Christ ransoms mankind from the wrath of God.
  2. The death of Christ pays in full for all the sins of mankind--past, present, and future.
  3. Salvation requires nothing at all on man’s part.
Part one is false because it assumes that the Bible uses the term “ransom” lexically to mean “liberation by payment of a price.” In reality, the three New-Testament passages using the word ransom (Matthew 20:28; Mark 10:45; and 1 Timothy 2:5-6) use it as a synonym for rescue--specifically, rescue from a state of sinfulness and its consequences. We know this because the Septuagint (the Greek-language version of the Old Testament quoted by Christ and his Apostles) uses a cognate word in the story of Israel’s exodus from Egypt. Obviously, God did not have to liberate Israel by paying Egypt some price; in fact, the Egyptians paid the Israelites to leave, so anxious were the Egyptians to be rid of them.

Part two is false because it leads to double jeopardy: if Christ has paid for all of our sins, then why does God have to punish sin a second time in hell? The only solution that the Atonement School has for this dilemma is the Calvinist concept of limited atonement, which proves decidedly unsatisfactory in light of Christ’s statement that he would draw ALL men unto himself on the cross.

Part three is false because it requires one to believe in “justification by faith alone,” the uniquely Lutheran flavor of the antinomian heresy.

In this lecture, you will hear from such standbys as R.C. Sproul, Robert Godfrey, and Bob Larson. But you will also hear from a thinker not heard before in these lectures: therapist and radio personality Michael W. Smith.

Run time: 30:16; Recorded: 6/21/15
The Atonement Part 69--Other Atonement Models ▾︎
Although the restored-icon model represents the majority opinion in Eastern Orthodoxy concerning the atonement, there are at least two other schools of thought. The first of these other schools, which our lecturer brands the “Alice-in-Wonderland School,” promulgates an array of fantastical models. These models see the cross as a mousetrap that catches Satan; see Christ as a live wire that shocks Satan; or see Christ as a purgative that gives death and Hades indigestion, forcing them to vomit out the dead.

The second school of thought simply imports PSA into Eastern Orthodoxy lock, stock, and barrel, baptizing the model as Orthodox. Our lecturer labels this group the “Orthodox Atonement School.”

Today’s lecture shows that neither of the alternate models of atonement is intellectually tenable, the prominent thinkers professing them notwithstanding.

Run time: 30:24; Recorded: 9/6/15
The Atonement Part 70--Dogma, Doctrine, Opinion ▾︎
A careful analysis of Eastern Orthodox theory and practice shows that the Church’s teachings sub-divide into three categories: dogma, doctrine, and opinion. Although each of these terms has a lexical definition, this lecture stipulates that they shall be defined in a manner more useful to us as ordinary folk. “Dogma” means: what one must believe. “Doctrine” means: what one should believe. “Opinion” means: what one can take or leave.

When an analyst faces data some of which seem to indicate “A,” some of which seem to indicate “non-A,” he must infer a claim that satisfactorily accounts for all the seemingly contradictory data. This is known as inference to the best explanation. Early Christian theologians reconciled the New Testament’s apparently contradictory statements regarding the godhead by inferring that the one God is a Trinity. This inference to the best explanation is professed as dogma in all three branches of Christianity.

The Restored-Icon model of atonement is likewise an inference to the best explanation. But unlike the Trinity, the Restored-Icon model ranks only as a theological opinion. While both of these teachings can be inferred from New-Testament data, the Seven Ecumenical Councils dogmatized on the Trinity and certain other topics while leaving the atonement without any comment at all. Thus, one is free to adopt whatever atonement model one likes, provided that no ramification of the model runs athwart any aspect of an officially defined dogma.

The importance of the Seven Ecumenical Councils as guides to understanding early Christian thought notwithstanding, they remain only fallible construals of infallible data. The Bible is the infallible data. The creeds of the Seven Ecumenical Councils are fallible construals thereof. This will surprise many who have been brought up believing that these conventicles are infallible. After all, the Eastern Orthodox Church is the “Church of the Seven Ecumenical Councils.” Yet this lecture shows that there are in fact three different schools of thought within the Eastern Orthodox Church regarding these councils.

Run time: 24:41; Posted: 9/24/15
The Atonement Part 71--Atonement, Tradition, and Ratiocination (a) ▾︎
As discussed in episode #69, there are at least three schools of thought within Eastern Orthodoxy concerning the atonement. What means do Christians have for weighing competing theological views? Is there an objective standard of truth by means of which we can judge such disputes? This lecture posits that ratiocination must serve as the standard of truth for all Christians.

Ratiocination, lexically defined, means:
  1. The process of exact thinking: REASONING.
  2. A reasoned train of thought.
As is our wont in this series, we modify the lexical definition, stipulating that for our purposes, ratiocination shall mean: “The logical, systematic interpretation of primary tradition by means of secondary and even tertiary tradition in those instances when primary tradition does not interpret itself.”

PRIMARY TRADITION consists of two things: the Bible and the tablet of nature. These are the ONLY elements of Holy Tradition that are inspired and inerrant. The Bible and the tablet of nature are data that unerringly reveal the word of God to mankind. Regrettably, data rarely construe themselves. In most instances, one has to construe primary tradition by means of secondary tradition.

SECONDARY TRADITION (also known as consensus) consists of the Seven Ecumenical Councils and the writings of the Church Fathers. Unlike the Bible and the tablet of nature, the Seven Ecumenical Councils and the Church Fathers are neither inspired nor inerrant. Nonetheless, the Church Fathers lived much closer to the time of the Apostles than we and the Seven Ecumenical Councils represent the consensus of thought among those early Fathers. Thus, one is warranted in using councils and Fathers to infer claims regarding unclear or disputed passages in the Bible.

TERTIARY TRADITION consists of liturgies, saints’ lives, iconography, pious practices, church architecture, and hymnody. These are uninspired sources and are of lesser authority than councils and Church Fathers. Therefore, they provide a much weaker warrant when inferring claims from primary tradition.

This lecture also discusses primary, secondary, and tertiary construal, diagramming how an argument moves from evidence to proof by means of such inference patterns.

Run time: 24:22; Posted: 2/6/16
The Atonement Part 72--Atonement, Tradition, and Ratiocination (b) ▾︎
This lecture begins by defending ratiocination as the standard of truth for conservative Christians. That logic is essential to theology is shown by the fact that Christ repeatedly refuses to show his adversaries miraculous signs; instead, he confronts them with argumentation. When put into standard form, Christ’s inference patterns appear to follow such classic Aristotelean forms as Modus Ponens. Passages like 1 Peter 2:21 tell us that Christ’s actions are exemplary and didactic. Therefore, we, too, should use logic and argumentation when resolving theological disputes.

The lecture moves on to discuss the two parts of primary tradition, the Bible and the tablet of nature, beginning with the latter. Psalms 19 and 97 tell us that the heavens show both God’s handiwork and his righteousness, communicating knowledge to us. Romans 1 tells us that this knowledge is clearly seen by all, Romans 2 telling us that God will judge us in accordance with our response to that knowledge.

Finally, the lecture addresses the other part of primary tradition, the Bible. Because our time is too short to accommodate a detailed argument for biblical inerrancy, we simply refer to the Bible’s famous declaration about itself in 2 Timothy 3:16-17. The balance of the lecture concentrates instead on exposing the liberalism rampant in the Eastern Orthodox clergy and intelligentsia.

Run time: 23:26; Posted: 2/13/16
The Atonement Part 73--Atonement, Tradition, and Ratiocination (c) ▾︎
This is the third lecture defending ratiocination as the standard of truth for conservative Christians. According to this thesis, the Bible and the tablet of nature are the infallible, unerring sources of God’s word. We refer to these as primary tradition. Secondary tradition comprises the Ecumenical Councils and the writings of the Church Fathers, neither of which sources is inspired or inerrant. Yet these uninspired sources serve as warrant when making inferences from primary tradition because they represent the consensus of late-antique thought.

The above view of the councils is a minority opinion in Eastern Orthodoxy, most Orthodox thinkers holding that the councils are inspired at least in their doctrinal formulations. Today’s lecture shows the futility of claiming that the councils are inspired in ANY aspect. These councils are hopelessly confused in their creeds, canons, and acts.

If the CREEDS of the Ecumenical Councils were inspired, then one would expect a later creed not to abrogate a previous creed, no changes being needed since all the formulations are God-breathed. Yet 1 Constantinople (AD 381) deleted the final article from the creed of 1 Nicea (AD 325), replacing it with the four articles more familiar to us today (“We believe in the Holy Ghost, etc.,” “We believe in one, etc.,” “We acknowledge one baptism, etc.,” and “We look for the resurrection, etc.”).

If the CANONS of the Ecumenical Councils were inspired, then one would expect them not to countermand Christ. Yet whereas Christ told his disciples not to occupy themselves with disputes over seating assignments (Mark 10:35-45), Canon 7 of Trullo (AD 692) insists that clergymen must scrupulously attend to their seating arrangements lest a deacon sit higher than a presbyter, or a presbyter higher than a metropolitan.

If the ACTS of the Ecumenical Councils were inspired, then one would expect them to profess a theology consonant with the same council’s creed. Yet the second and fourth sessions of the acts of Chalcedon (AD 451) hail Cyril of Alexandria’s condemnation of the “frenzied folly” of Nestorius despite the fact that Chalcedon’s creed is far closer to the Antiochian Christology of Nestorius than to the hyper-Alexandrine (read Monophysite) Christology of Cyril.

The lecture concludes by showing that the Ecumenical Councils are of extremely limited value for inferring soteriological matters. For example, one cannot infer anything regarding the atonement from these councils unless one first knows the late-antique paradigm with which the bishops at these councils were working.

Run time: 27:40; Posted: 2/24/16
The Atonement Part 74--Atonement, Tradition, and Ratiocination (d) ▾︎
This is the fourth lecture defending ratiocination as the standard of truth for conservative Christians. This schema deems the Ecumenical Councils and Church Fathers valuable for their historic witness to early Christian theology and practice, but rejects any claim to their being inspired.

By contrast, Eastern Orthodox propagandists typically declare the Church Fathers to be inspired and infallible any time they proffer an interpretation of a biblical text. Some extreme chauvinists (known in Orthodox circles as “Ultra-Orthodox”) go even further, claiming that the Church Fathers are infallible when pronouncing on any topic whatsoever.

Today’s lecture shows the Church Fathers to be infallible neither when interpreting the Bible nor when interpreting the tablet of nature.

If the Church Fathers were infallible readers of scripture, then their theology would show systematic consistency. Lack of systematic consistency unfailingly signals falsity. Falsity is incompatible with inspiration. The incompatibility of patristic writings with inspiration can be shown using just one area of theology, the atonement. The Church Fathers drew upon so many disparate and contradictory models of atonement that one cannot infer any kind of coherent, systematic model of atonement from their writings. Even isolating the Fathers one from another does not help matters because each one drew upon multiple models of the atonement, sometimes even in the same paragraph. We will demonstrate that today in the writings of Leo the Great, Athanasius, and John Damascene.

If the Church Fathers were infallible readers of the tablet of nature, then their writings would not be an embarrassment to modern science. Yet John Damascene’s Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith abounds with so many scientific absurdities that no disinterested person could possibly call him inspired of God.

The desire to make the Church Fathers into infallible demi-gods is a symptom of hyper-piety. One’s hysterically asserting the inspiration of demonstrably mistake-ridden writings only proves one an obscurantist or, worse, a propagandist. Men of honor the Church Fathers certainly were; demi-Gods, they were not.

Run time: 23:44; Posted: 3/11/16
The Atonement Part 75--Atonement, Tradition, and Ratiocination (e) ▾︎
Rejecting ratiocination as the standard of truth for conservative Christians, Eastern Orthodox controversialists usually offer “The Church” in its place. Today’s lecture refutes the church-as-standard-of-truth thesis in three steps.

First, we give a plausible definition for what the Bible means by the word “church” in such passages as 1 Timothy 3:15 (which calls the church the “pillar and ground of truth”) and Matthew 18:17 (which likens those who do not hear the church to heathens and tax collectors). If by “church” the Bible means the institutional Eastern Orthodox Church, then the phrase “pillar and ground of truth” must have a greatly attenuated meaning because hagiographies (saints’ lives) routinely mix history and fiction (something that many in the laity suspect but demur from stating for fear of being branded as impious). An institution claiming to uphold truth like a pillar would certainly not pass off such impostures as history. Thus, we have to conclude that 1 Timothy 3:15 and Matthew 18:17 refer to something other than the brick-and-mortar Eastern Orthodox Church.

Second, we show that attempting to find a brick-and-mortar institution corresponding to the concept of the “true church” commits an error in reasoning known as “word magic.” One would not go on the hunt for a living, breathing unicorn on the basis that the concept of unicorns exists on paper. In short, all of the propaganda concerning Eastern Orthodoxy’s being the “true church” amounts to yet another instance of reification.

Third, we show that when Eastern Orthodox controversialists use the word “church,” they actually mean clergy. The sad reality is that the layman has no value in the institutional Eastern Orthodox Church. Encomiums paid to the “royal priesthood” of laymen amount to lip service only. The bishop is a living pillar and ground of truth in this paradigm, which puts one on a rather odd footing given that some of history’s most noisome heresies--the Apollinarian, the Nestorian, and the Macedonian--are named after bishops. Thus, the standard of truth for Christians can neither be a conclave of bishops nor one supreme bishop.

Having shown that bishops are but fallible men, today’s lecture then dismantles the paternalistic myth that laymen are children who cannot operate as Christians without the bishop’s explicit permission. Indeed, a bishop’s permission slip (his “imprimatur”) is completely worthless. As warrant for this assertion, we present excerpts from a catechism approved by an Orthodox Metropolitan despite the fact that the catechism endorses original sin, total depravity, infant depravity, and the ransom-to-God theory. While concepts like infant depravity would be at home in a Reformed congregation, they are inimical to the restored-icon model of atonement, which the Eastern Orthodox Church has traditionally embraced.

Given these failings, perhaps the Eastern Orthodox Church in theory is the “true church,” but the Eastern Orthodox Church in brick and mortar is about as doctrinally erratic as the Protestants whom Orthodox chauvinists routinely mock.

Run time: 30:03; Posted: 3/19/16
The Atonement Part 76--Atonement, Tradition, and Ratiocination (f) ▾︎
As we embark on the very last episode in our series on the atonement, we finish our defense of ratiocination by examining a competing claim that the standard of truth for Christians is to be found on the lips of the parish priest or the “clairvoyant elder” at the monastery. This is the dysfunctional paradigm that our lecturer calls “magic priest syndrome” (MPS).

Orthodox clergy cynically exploit MPS to silence fractious laymen. When a layman questions a clergyman’s judgement, the clergyman may roar back, “Who’s your spiritual father?” or “Who’s your authorizing bishop?” rather than answering the charge. This tactic forestalls disagreement by implying that the questioner is an impious maverick disobedient to God.

Remarkably, even laymen help propagate this sham theology. However much lip service Eastern Orthodox theologians pay to the concept of our being a priesthood of all believers, the reality is that lay people count for nothing in this religion; all honor and authority belong to the priestly class. Realizing this, an enormous number of the men converting to this religion hope immediately to be ordained themselves, knowing that as laymen they have no status. And because their entrance into seminary depends on the priest’s recommendation, these priest-wannabes become abject lickspittles, blogging that anyone with theological questions should “just ask the priest” and that Orthodox Christians should “never do anything without the bishop’s blessing.” These needy, approval-seeking sorts write these things hoping to be noticed by clergymen who will recognize these lay bloggers as piously indignant on their behalf and therefore worthy of seminary.

This lecture then addresses the dangerously deluded notion that certain monastics have achieved clairvoyance through years of pious discipline. In reality, these monks and elders have simply learned to read people and situations by dint of hearing thousands of confessions over many decades. Believing these men to be clairvoyant betokens the kind of naïveté and intellectual laziness so characteristic of those thinking themselves “mystical.” Far from being mystical, these duped Eastern Orthodox behave no differently than any cultist worshipping at the feet of a fakir or guru.

This series has refuted the false dogma of vicarious atonement, offering the restored-icon model in its place. This model is not the product of an ecumenical council. It is not the product of any one Church Father. It is not the product of a brick-and-mortar institution. And it is certainly not the product of a magic priest or clairvoyant elder. The restored-icon model is a systematic theology built on the assembly line of ratiocination.

Run time: 27:05; Posted: 3/25/16
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