Atonement Part 1 - GBC Bulletin Column #38

The Bible teaches us unequivocally that God became sinless-though-tempted man in Jesus the Christ. During his three- year ministry, this Jesus commanded people to turn away from their sins to follow God and condemned those who refused to do so. The all-pervading message of the gospel is that Christ lovingly died an exemplary, selfless death in perfect once-for-all sacrifice on a cross thus satisfying the righteous wrath of the Father by substitutionally enduring what rebellious mankind deserved, washing away sin and delivering sinners from the penalty and power of sin.

As Christians have sought to plumb the depths of this glorious message, they have asked deeper questions about the nature and extent of the atonement - and given different answers! As a Grace Baptist, I am an heir to the theological traditions of the early Particular Baptists and so have a clear notion as to my beliefs on this subject – but God forbid that what I believe is the product of what I am, a blindly accepted tenet of some brand of hyphenated Christianity rather than a biblically discerned truth of the word of God! Rather may what I am, be the outpouring of what I believe. This is my attempt (albeit feeble) to outline the Bible’s teaching on those more controversial aspects of the atonement.

Limited atonement: “L” in the TULIP acronym often used to articulate the “doctrines of grace”; Singular redemption: the last “S” in ROSES, Timothy George’s equivalent acronym in Amazing Grace: God’s Pursuit, Our Response; Guys like me wonder “Tulips, roses…what’s with all the flowers?” and so some choose to go with BACON, where “completely atoned for” is of course represented by the letter “C.”  The concept embodied by these letters is often misunderstood and oversimplified by its detractors, but this could be because it is often badly explained and poorly articulated by its defenders.

A tendency to rest in philosophical, logical arguments instead of the Word of God, the sacrifice of precision and clarity for the clever and cute memorability of acronyms, an insistence on shoe-horning an incomprehensibly grand concept into inadequate sound-bytes, and a sinful arrogance that disrespects, disregards, and dismisses anyone who disagrees, are all factors that tell me that this doctrine, historically known as “particular redemption” has so often been misrepresented by its critics chiefly because it is misrepresented by some of its proponents! 

To be continued. This is from the unedited version of an article published in the January edition of Grace Magazine. This was printed in the worship bulletin of Grace Baptist Church (Wood Green) on 12 January 2014.