Category: Soteriology

Lately the doctrine of the Penal Substitutionary Atonement of the death of Christ has been being assaulted online by various Arminians, Provisionists, Amyraldians, Lutherans, and Roman Catholics. All of them have in common the idea that Christ’s death was hypothetically universal. That is to say they all believe that Christ died for all men everywhere without distinction. Thus, there are numerous people, according to this thought system, for whom Christ died but without efficacy so as to accomplish what was intended inasmuch as not all men are saved.

All of the above mentioned must reject the Penal Substitutionary theory of the Atonement since the Penal Substitutionary Atonement explicitly teaches that Jesus Christ most certainly did not die for all men without distinction, but rather only died to the end of substituting for and so saving a distinct people (called the elect).

A few notations on this matter;

1.) A complaint is often issued that Calvinism teaches “Limited Atonement,” but in point of fact this teaching is not unique to the Biblically Reformed. Indeed, all who believe in hypothetical Universalism (the doctrine that the intent of the Atonement was potentially for all men though it is recognized that all men are not saved), teach a limited atonement. However, there is a difference inasmuch as while the Calvinist doctrine of limited atonement teaches that God, in election, limits the atonement, those who advocate for a hypothetical atonement teach that it is man who limits God’s desire for all men, without distinction, to be saved.

2.) This teaching that Christ died for all but some frustrate God’s design and intent is contradictory. If Christ died for all then the death of Christ paid for all the sins of all men. If all sins of all men are died for by Christ’s death on the Cross then not even the sin of unbelief in Christ’s death can be excluded as a sin for which Christ died and if Christ’s death includes the payment for sin, it includes the payment of sin that refuses to believe in Jesus Christ. The options here for the hypothetical universalist is to either drop the “hypothetical” part and so become full blown universalist or drop the universalist part and leave Christ’s death a hypothetical that applies to everyone in general but to no one specifically.

3.) We should also note that the denial of the Penal Substitutionary Atonement with the embrace of hypothetical universalism means that not only does the death of Christ apply to all men potentially, it is also the case potentially that the death of Christ would not apply to anybody. The doctrine of hypothetical makes it possible that all men can potentially be saved but guarantees that no men will be saved.

4.) Clearly, this denial of the Penal Substitutionary Atonement also is a denial of justification by grace alone. With the doctrine of hypothetical universalism the Cross doesn’t justify but only provides the opportunity to be justified. This opportunity to be justified can only be cashed in on if fallen man adds his faith consent. In such an arrangement faith becomes a work that man contributes so as to put the machinery of justification into motion. With hypothetical universalism faith becomes a working organ that contributes the energizing that makes the cross effective to the end of justification instead of an organ that does it’s proper work when it doesn’t work but instead rests in Christ for all.

5.) With the doctrine of hypothetical universalism Christ propitiates (turns away the just wrath of God against the sinner) against the sinner while at the same time saying that propitiation is provisional upon the basis of fallen man’s acquiescence to being propitiated for. In other words, in hypothetical universalism the turning away of God’s wrath is conditional upon fallen man’s consent to Christ propitiating the Father’s just and reasonable wrath against sin. It begins to be clear who is really the agent of justification here. Christ dies for all. All are not saved. The difference lies in those who are justified as opposed to the one who does the justifying. Is justification really to God’s glory alone in this arrangement?

6.) The same is true of the doctrine of reconciliation. The doctrine of reconciliation teaches not only that man is alienated from God but also that God is alienated from man. In Penal Substitutionary Atonement Christ is the alone mediator who alone reconciles man to God and God to man with and in His atoning and reconciling death on the Cross. However, in hypothetical universalism Christ does not Himself reconcile but only makes provision for reconciliation. The real provision for reconciliation comes when fallen man makes the machinery of reconciliation operative by buying in. Again, here it is not really Jesus Christ and His cross work that reconciles, rather, the reason why some men are reconciled to God and others are not lies in the fact that some fallen men via their faith work made the wheels of the cross efficient.

7.) The same can be said of expiation, redemption, ransom, sacrifice, substitution, and all the other doctrinal streams that flow into the river we call Atonement. The denial of the Penal Substitutionary Atonement is the denial of Biblical Christianity with the corresponding embrace of a horizontal man-centered auto-soteriology. The denial of Penal Substitutionary Atonement is also the denial that man is totally depraved in favor of partially depraved. It is the denial of unconditional election opting for  man-centered conditional election. It is the denial of sovereign irresistible grace in favor of a common / prevenient grace that sometimes is successful and sometimes isn’t depending on the cooperation of fallen man to improve on grace. It is the denial of the perseverance of the saints favoring instead the falling away of the saints depending upon their will power.

But wait … there is more.

If the doctrine of Penal Substitutionary Atonement is not true then neither can be the doctrine of an Imputation that finds God reckoning the sins of the elect to Christ and Christ’s righteous to the elect. Remember, there is no elect in Hypothetical Universalism, when consistently held. There is only potentially elect and as such the potentially elect can only have an imputation that is likewise potential and not actual.

Further, if the doctrine of the Penal Substitutionary Atonement is not true and it is not the case that Christ pays the penalty as the substitution providing the atonement for a particular people then there is no reason to believe that Christ continues to pray as our Great High Priest, efficient to the end all that He secured in His sacrifice. If Hypothetical Universalism is true then it applies not only to Christ’s work as Priest, sacrifice, and altar as being only potential but it also applies to Christ’s continued work as our Great High Priest in praying for His people. If Christ did not have a particular people He sacrificed Himself for as their Great High Priest, then Christ can in no way pray for a particular people while at the right hand of the Father.

The denial of Penal Substitutionary Atonement ends in auto-soterism and if consistently held means the end of Biblical Christianity. Fortunately, there are countless numbers of people who are indeed among the elect who deny the necessary doctrine of Penal Substitutionary Atonement.  All kinds of Christians are involved in felicitous inconsistency.

Because of Christ’s finished work and out of our Union w/ Christ arises a two-fold benefit. One benefit is completely forensic, declarative, and judicial. This benefit is completely outside of us. It is the benefit of having Christ for us the Hope of glory. In this forensic benefit we have our sins gratuitously removed and we are imputed with the righteousness of Jesus Christ because of His sin bearing work in our stead and on our behalf. This we call justification/adoption.

The second benefit is renovative, transformative, and renewing. What God’s freely declares us to be, by His poured out Spirit He works in us to increasingly become. Incrementally and increasingly, though never perfectly we put off the old man of sin and put on Christ. This we refer to as regeneration/sanctification.

Both of these benefits imply the other. There is no salvation that is not constitutive of Justification (what Christ does for us outside of us) and Sanctification (What Christ does for us inside of us) but the relation between the two is important to think rightly about.

Justification leads to sanctification the way a rock thrown into a clear, glass like pond leads to ripples in the water. The ripples in the water are not the cause of the rock being cast into the water but those ripples are the necessary and inevitable consequence that the rock has indeed splashed. So sanctification is only a necessary aspect of justification the way that ripples are a necessary aspect of a rock being cast into the water.

Rome’s mistake here is that Rome wants to make the ripples in the water a contributing cause of the Rock being splashed. This is to place works in our justification and yield up a legalism.

The opposite error is to champion for a justification that minimizes sanctification. For example, Mike Horton has said that sanctification is just getting used to your justification. That is a minimalist approach that degrades both justification and sanctification. This is to absent works from our salvation and yields up a anti-nomianism.

In the past 15 years or so we have had, in the Reformed world, a donnybrook of a fight between the legalist error as embraced by Federal Vision theology and the anti-nomian error as embraced by Radical Two Kingdom theology. These two warring parties were each insisting that they alone were the keepers of the Holy Grail of Reformed orthodoxy when in point of fact those who were truly orthodox was wishing a pox upon both their houses. Neither one of these ugly extremes were correct and yet it seemed that everyone was taking up for one side or the other. The warfare between the two parties has subdued somewhat but it still is seething under the surface.

There is another error that enters in here and that is called “neo-nomianism.” Neo-nomianism reduces the demands of God’s requirement and then tells Christians that they can merit favor with God by the ability to achieve these now reduced and achievable requirements. Oddly enough, neo-nomianism is both legalistic (it teaches that God’s reduced law can be met) and antinomian (it teaches that God’s law requirements are lessened) at the same time.

The impact of the Gospel works outside of us and inside of us. We are never forensically declared righteous where we are not also transformed by the Spirit who was given us as a guarantee of that which is to come. Similarly, there is no interior renewal without a complete leaning upon Jesus Christ alone and His works imputed to us so that we might be pleasing to God.

“The atonement is the crucial doctrine of the faith.  Unless we are right here it matters little, or so it seems to me, what we are like elsewhere.”

Dr. Leon Morris
The Atonement; Its Meaning & Significance

As we continue to dismantle Dr. Clay Libolt’s heretical view of the atonement we pause to inquire about why there is so much disagreement about the meaning of the Hebrew word “ כִּפֻּר”(Kippur) as amongst those counted as “scholars.” Answering this query will reveal much.

When I was in Seminary we were taught the glorious importance of the original languages of the Hebrew and the Greek. We were all required to take years of each. There is no doubt that the languages are important but along the way I learned that there is something even more important than knowing the languages — something underneath the languages upon which the languages rest and that something is the idea of Weltanschauung (Worldview).

I realized this in the course of doing all my study on the Hebrew and Greek. I realized this simply because when one referred to the aids (as one has to do when learning the languages) one began to discover that very smart people had very different opinions on the meaning of different Greek and Hebrew terms/words. Over time it became apparent that these scholars were disagreeing not because of the meaning of the Hebrew or Greek word or passage but rather they were disagreeing because of their own Weltanschauung that they were bringing to the text. In other words, when a word/term/phrase from the original language was in dispute the differences between the different scholars was due to the fact that they were bringing their worldview to the text and it was because of that worldview that they were coming to the conclusions that there were variously arriving at when considering the meaning of different Hebrew and Greek words.

Think about this for just a moment and it will become clear. If it were the case that the languages alone cleared up all disputes then we would no longer have various and competing theological schools of thought. If one could come to the obvious meaning of the text only by taking into account the linguistic / grammatical meaning of the Hebrew and Greek words then we would not have Arminian, or Reformed, or Lutheran, or Roman Catholic, etc. scholars disagreeing about this or that theological point because they could all just retreat to the original languages and the original languages and the understanding thereof would settle the dispute between them. This, most assuredly does not happen and as a result we must conclude that the reason that the disagreements exist is that the World and Life view of any particular scholar in question is moving him or her to read the text in a particular way.

Nowhere is this observation more true when it comes to the debate of the Hebrew word group Kipper (covering) and the Greek word group Hilasmos (propitiation). When these words are examined the meaning of those words are going to be heavily debated because of their theological import. It is not to much to say that Reformed guys like Leon Morris and Louis Berkhof etc. who are Reformed read Kipper and Hilasmos the way they did because of their panoramic understanding of God and Christianity. In the same way Clay Libolt, as well as the chaps he cites, reads Kipper and Hilasmos the way they do because of their raging man-centered theology. For these chaps Kipper and Hilasmos decidedly do not mean what Morris and Berkhof understand those words to mean and that is, in the end, because Libolt, N. T. Wright, John Walton, etc. don’t like the kind of God that Morris, Berkhof, and the authors of the Reformation Confessions affirmed.

Now, none of this is to say that Kipper and Hilasmos don’t have stable meanings. It means instead that the arrival of the meaning of those words and the disputing of the meaning of those words are dependent upon a whole of Scripture contextual reading and understanding. I agree with scholars like Leon Morris on the meaning of Kipper and Hilasmos (covering/propitiation) because we each read the Scriptures as a whole in the same way and in reading the whole of Scripture in the same way we find the word grouping Kipper and Hilasmos to mean the same. If I were to read the Bible as a whole the same way Libolt does, I would do all I could to tear apart the stable meanings of the words Kipper and Hilasmos so as to make them mean anything but that which associates those meanings with God’s just wrath against sin, with the necessity of blood sacrifice to turn away God’s just wrath, with the necessity for covering by means of substitution. If I thought like Libolt thinks (and I daily thank God I don’t) then in order to sustain my theology that holds;

“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”

H. Richard Niebuhr
The Kingdom of God in America

I would do all within my power, given my station and rank, to obliterate those stable meanings.

What Libolt does in his eviscerating of the words Kipper (covering) and Hilasmos (propitiation) is the same thing that C. S. Lewis wrote about in his book, “Pilgrim’s Regress.” In that book Lewis has the following exchange between two characters;

C.S. Lewis wrote about a man who ordered milk and eggs from a waiter in a restaurant. After tasting the milk he commented to the waiter that it was delicious. The waiter replied, “Milk is only the secretion of a cow, just like urine and feces.” After eating the eggs he commented on the tastiness of the eggs. Again the waiter responded that eggs are only a by-product of a chicken. After thinking about the waiter’s comment for a moment the man responded, “You lie. You don’t know the difference between what nature has meant for nourishment, and what it meant for garbage.

In this same way Libolt, N. T. Wright, John Walton and countless other “Christians” have taken the milk and eggs that are Kipper and Hilasmos and like the waiter in Lewis’s “Pilgrim’s Regress,” have redefined those words so that they amount to urine and feces — and that so as to fit their demented Weltanschaung.

Clay Libolt himself admitted this in his piece. He admitted in his piece that the reason that the allowing for sexual perversion did not pass in the Christian Reformed Denomination (CRC) was due to the fact that they had misinterpreted Kipper/Hilasmos and as such they had a God that would never be friendly to sexual perversion. His goal is to correct his readers thinking about God consistent with his version of Kipper/Hilasmos so that he can jam through acceptance of sexual perversion in the CRC. A change in one’s theology means, by necessity, a change in one’s anthropology, and a change in one’s hamartiology (doctrine of sin).

You see the God of Penal Substitutionary Atonement is a God who fits Clay Libolt’s egalitarian Christianity. PSA explicitly teaches that God is opposed to the kind of egalitarianism that allows for all sinners to come into the church without repenting of their sin. The reality of this is seen in the fact that the PSA is discriminating. Christ does not die as the substitute for each and every individual who has ever lived. Christ dies for those given to Him by the Father.  The cross is thus discriminating and not egalitarian in the least. What follows from this is that the Church likewise is a discriminating institution that is not egalitarian in the least as seen in fact that it screens who can be part of the body of Christ. Only those whom Christ has died for, whom the Spirit applies that redemption to as evidenced by faith and repentance by the supplicant seeking entry. The anti-egalitarianism then, of the PSA is what Clay is railing at as seen by the fact that Clay desires the sexually perverted to come into the Church quite without the evidence of faith and repentance.

Now all of the above I offer in refutation of Clay’s “examination” of the word Kipper in his articles. If someone desires to read a detailed expose on the meaning of the atonement and all the words surrounding it I would recommend the following books;

The Atonement; Its Meaning & Significance
Dr. Leon Morris

The Apostle’s Doctrine of the Atonement
George Smeaton

Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution
Jeffrey, Ovey, Sach

If the reader desires more than that write me and ask. I’ve tried to read one book a year since being in the ministry (1989) on the atonement. After continuing to do this reading over the years I can say, without hesitation, that nearly everything that Clay Libolt says about atonement (sourced from the Liberal authors as they are) is errant. I am sure what Clay writes about in terms of atonement is indeed by affirmed by many people but the many people that believe in the kind of atonement that Clay writes about are not Christian.

Libolt, following his sources, insists that atonement is not about the cleansing of the person offering the sacrifice but it is rather about the cleansing of the sanctuary. The sacrifice is offered up so that God can inhabit the environs where the sacrifice is made and not so the person bringing the sacrifice might be cleansed.

However, such a understanding stands against the stream of the Scripture already established before we get to Leviticus. The stream of Scripture already finds us with Adam and Eve being clothed by God with animal skins. Though “Kipper” is not used in this passage the idea of covering is clearly present and the death of animals is more than implied in order that Adam and Eve might be clothed. When we get to the deliverance from Egypt and the first Passover we find the death of the lambs and the spreading of the lamb blood on the lintels of the door that the death angel may pass over so that the first born of the home would not suffer death. In both the Genesis example and the Exodus deliverance animals are substitutes in the place of where death was to visit. Already, at this point, a type is being established in Scripture and Kipper in later revelation will arrive in order to augment and build on this already established narrative. Finally, in the Gospels Christ arrives as the great anti-type and His cousin says of Jesus the Christ;

“Behold the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world.”

I submit to you that every Jew listening to that proclamation knew that by that statement, penalty, substitution, and atonement were what John the Baptist was proclaiming.

In the next installment we will look more at the idea of propitiation, expiation, and we will continue to disassemble Libolt’s reasoning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With this post I continue to dismantle the neo-orthodoxy of Dr. Clay Libolt in a series that he is doing wherein he seeks to dismantle the doctrine of Penal Substitutionary Atonement. Clay is extremely displeased that his denomination (Christian Reformed Church) voted to agree with what Scripture says about sexual perversion. Clay, properly understands that only once the theology of the denomination is changed can the anthropology of the denomination change so that perversion can be embraced as normative. Clay’s articles attacking Penal Substitutionary Atonement is to the end of normalizing sexual perversion.

Clay writes;

I was a reporter at Synod 2022 and reported on the PSA debate. What is not quite clear from the official record is how the delegates seemed to view PSA. Theologians from as long as there has been theology have viewed statements about God as analogical. What we have are our human languages and our perception of the world in which we live. We use these to speak by analogy of what we cannot otherwise know. No one can see directly into the divine world. We speak of it guardedly as a mystery. But not these synod delegates. They seemed to regard PSA simply as the way things are, not only on earth but in heaven. There was a distressing lack of humility in the debate.

Bret responds,

1.) Inasmuch as the delegates to Synod 2022 affirmed Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA) it is clear that the delegates viewed as taught in Scripture.

2.) What Clay does above is he changes the meaning of the word analogical to mean equivocal. For something to be equivocal means that it is open to a multitude of interpretations. That is not the meaning of analogical. To speak analogically is to see a parallel of truth in two similar but not exact things. For example, a canoe paddle is analogical of a screw on a Battleship propulsion. Both serve the purpose of propelling the ship forward, and yet they differ in size. When Clay, above, complains that the delegates to 2022 didn’t understand analogical reasoning what he is really complaining about is that the delegates didn’t understand that the atonements’ meaning was equivocal — which is to say that the atonement has no stable meaning.

Clay desires equivocal in language because only by equivocation can room be made for his heretical understanding of the atonement. If the atonement doesn’t have stable meaning then it can mean whatever Clay wants it to mean. So again, Clay complains about the delegates not understanding that there is analogical language used in the atonement, but what he really wants is to define “analogical” to mean “equivocal,” so that atonement can be made to be a wax nose that allows for nearly any interpretation.

3.) Clay continues to seek to try and muddy the atonement scene by insisting that “No one can see directly into the divine world. We speak of it guardedly as a mystery.”

a.) We can see directly into the divine world because we have the Revelation of God and nowhere in the Scriptures is the atonement spoken of as a mystery.

b.) Of course this statement undercuts Clay’s own nouveau revised version of the atonement as well as the long received biblical doctrine of the PSA. If Clay cannot see directly into the divine world, he should speak guardedly of any doctrine of the atonement he prefers only as mystery.  By Clay’s own reasoning no doctrine of the atonement (including his) should be championed because “no one can see directly into the divine world.” You see, Clay champions uncertainty about PSA so that he can tell you in the next breath that he is certain about his heretical doctrine of the atonement — and that even though he can’t see directly into the divine world.

4.) Clay continues with the irony by complaining about the lack of humility of the 2022 synodical delegates while seemingly completely missing his own lack of humility as demonstrated by being so certain that they were wrong and he is right. Physician heal thyself when it comes to this lack of humility.

Clay goes on;

But however you understand PSA, whether as a metaphor for God’s grace or as the way things actually happen, the question remains: is it in fact biblical? Do “the Scriptures and confessional standards make clear. . ..” what PSA and the synod claim about God?

Bret responds;

It really is quite astounding and dumbfounding at the same time that Clay would suggest that the Confessions as well as the Scripture does not support PSA. Below we consider just a few statements of the Belgic Confession of Faith which with stark clarity, citing Scripture reference, gives a full throated affirmation of the PSA.

1.) Confessions on PSA;

a.) Article 19 of “The Belgic Confession of Faith” teaches;

Wherefore we confess that He (Jesus the Christ) is very God and very man: very God by His power to conquer death, and very man that He might die for us according to the infirmity of His flesh.

b.) Article 2o of the The Belgic Confession of Faith teaches;

We believe that God, who is perfectly merciful and just, sent His Son to assume that nature in which the disobedience was committed, to make satisfaction in the same and to bear the punishment of sin by His most bitter passion and death.1 God therefore manifested His justice against His Son when He laid our iniquities2 upon Him and poured forth His mercy and goodness on us, who were guilty and worthy of damnation, out of mere and perfect love, giving His Son unto death for us and raising Him for our justification,3 that through Him we might obtain immortality and life eternal.

1 Heb. 2:14; Rom. 8:3, 32–33 2 Isa. 53:6; John 1:29; 1 John 4:9
3 Rom. 4:25

c.) Belgic Confession of Faith Article 21

Article 21

The Satisfaction of Christ, Our Only High Priest, For Us 

We believe that Jesus Christ is ordained with an oath to be an everlasting High Priest after the order of Melchizedek,1and that He hath presented Himself in our behalf before the Father to appease His wrath by His full satisfaction,2 by
offering Himself on the tree of the cross, and pouring out His precious blood to purge away our sins, as the prophets had foretold. For it is written, He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and with His stripes we are healed. He was brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and numbered with the transgressors;
3 and condemned by Pontius Pilate as a malefactor, though he had first declared Him innocent.4 Therefore, He restored that which He took not away,5 and suffered the just for the unjust,6 as well in His body as in His soul, feeling the terrible punishment which our sins had merited; insomuch that His sweat became like unto drops of blood falling on the ground.7 He called out, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? 8 and hath suffered all this for the remission of our sins.

Wherefore we justly say with the apostle Paul, that we know nothing but Jesus Christ, and Him crucified;9 we count all things but loss and dung for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus our Lord, 10 in whose wounds we find all manner of consolation. Neither is it necessary to seek or invent any other means of being reconciled to God than this only sacrifice, once offered, by which believers are made perfect forever.11 This is also the reason why He was called by the angel of God, Jesus, that is to say, Savior, because He should save His people from their sins.12

1 Ps. 110:4; Heb. 5:10 2 Col. 1:14; Rom. 5:8–9; Col. 2:14; Heb. 2:17; 9:14; Rom. 3:24; 8:2; John 15:3; Acts 2:24; 13:28; John 3:16; 1 Tim.
2:6
3 Isa. 53:5, 7, 12
4 Luke 23:22, 24; Acts 13:28; Ps. 22:16; John 18:38; Ps. 69:5; 1 Peter 3:18
5 Ps. 69:5
6 1 Peter 3:18
7 Luke 22:44
8 Ps. 22:2; Matt. 27:46
9 1 Cor. 2:2
10 Phil. 3:8 11 Heb. 9:25–26; 10:14 12 Matt. 1:21; Acts 4:12

Clay may not like PSA but in order to avoid it the Christian Reformed Church would either have to change their confessions or failing that,  ignore them in order to arrive where Clay arrives.

Part IV to follow.