The Bishop of Stafford and the Doctrine of the Atonement
How I love having “good news stories” to report.
Rt Rev Gordon Mursell has been the Bishop of Stafford for about 2 years now. Last summer he met with our local Reform meeting, and as a result of that decided it would be a good thing to spend more time studying the Bible with the clergy in his area. So between the new year and this week there have been 3 Bible studies. About 50 or so clergy came to each one, and the numbers held up encouragingly. The Bishop led the first one (looking at the NT texts that speak of baptism) and the third one (looking at some of the biblical texts that inform a doctrine of the atonement). The Archdeacon led the middle one.
They were fine, encouraging, informing experiences. The Bishop would speak on each passage in turn, with plenty of time for extra comments / questions from the floor. The first session started with him laying out a few ground-rules, mainly that we were concerned with sitting under the authority of Scripture (however that is understood) rather than with abstract debate. His own depth of study, grasp of NT Greek, and love of the Scriptures came through – even though he delivered with marked humility.
But paticularly encouraging was the last session, this last Monday. I think I’m right in saying that Bishop Gordon would not classify himself as an evangelical. Nevertheless he recommended two books on the atonement that deserve reading and re-reading, and which he said had stretched and encouraged him as he had (re-)read them over the past month or two. Those books were:
John Stott’s The Cross of Christ
Steve Jeffery, Mike Ovey, Andrew Sach: Pierced for our Transgressions
The Bishop reported that he agreed with nearly everything in the latter book. Nearly everything because of two points where he felt unease:
- Particular Atonement: He is uneasy with any view of the atonement which does not have the whole cosmos as its scope. We didn’t have time to pick up on that point in the discussion, but it became clear as he talked that he is not a universalist. Therefore by “cosmic in scope”, he could not have meant “every human being without exception”, but “global, touching every corner of society and even the physical fabric of our world”. I suspect he is therefore uneasy with “limited atonement” because of a misunderstanding of the nature of the limiatation / particularity.
- Penal Sub: As a headline, this is a more serious point of unease. After all, defending penal substitution is a large part of the point of PFOT. He was very quick to say that he sees explicit, throughout Scripture, that Jesus is our substitute. He just doesn’t see the point explicitly made that such substitution entails the Father punishing his own Son.
BUT: (i) He said again and again that punishment for sin is real and inescapable. (ii) He said again and again that wrath is personal and deliberate, and refuted C H Dodd most convincingly. (iii) He said again and again that the Son’s substitution is total, and he stands in our place to absorb the full consequence of our sin.
Someone then asked him a question, to the effect of: “If the Father’s punishment for sin is personal, deliberate and his own action, and if the Son stood between us and the Father’s wrath at our sin, must it not be so that the Father deliberately punished his own Son instead of us?” To which he basically agreed. The conclusion, then, was that he is uncomfortable saying that the Father punished his own Son in our place, but in spite of that discomfort it is inescapable that he did. It’s just hard to say so in so many words.
All in all, a most encouraging session.