Saturday, February 24, 2007

Pierced for our transgressions

I heard that this was coming and am very glad to see Dave Bish heralding its arrival.

Table of contents, endorsements, and foreword (by John Piper) can be found here

Here is the blurb from the home page:

"The doctrine of penal substitution states that God gave himself in the person of his Son to suffer instead of us the death, punishment and curse due to fallen humanity as the penalty for sin.

Although this is the historic Christian view, it has recently come under attack. Controversy has raged since 2003 when Steve Chalke, founder of the Oasis Trust, likened the doctrine to ‘a form of cosmic child abuse’.

Pierced for our Transgressions offers a fresh affirmation of penal substitution, engaging with exegetical, theological, pastoral and historical perspectives. It is designed to be useful for pastors, theological students, and all thinking Christians."

It is a sad fact that scholars and popular preachers within evangelicalism have in recent years breathed life into the dead, and deadening, theology of the 16th and 17th century Socinians. Claiming to be the authentic good news this denial of Christ's penal substitutionary work has been passing itself off as theologically acceptable. And of course it will do that if churches are ignorant of what the Bible teaches and what orthodox churches clearly rejected on biblical grounds in the past.

It is so good to see this book.

1 comment:

Jon said...

Steve Holmes is busy writing a popular level book about penal substitution too... That'll probably be fairly good...