In his letter (NZ Baptist, May), Bruce Richmond attacks the direction of the “emergent” church. Yet more and more Christians are discovering that this movement is able to sustain their faith in an age where much of what has built up as Christian belief and practice by past generations seems no longer theologically tenable or spiritually sustaining.

Further, it has begun to nurture spiritual disciplines that make sense to people with no faith or have left faith behind, in a way that more traditional evangelicalism struggles to do.

Bruce gives the example of the atonement, stating (correctly) that Brian McLaren and many others have given up the “substitution theory,” the view that sin requires God to enact the death penalty and that Jesus took that punishment in place of us.

Yet it is only one attempt to explain how atonement works. It suffers from numerous logical and moral flaws and I take one example of each.

If Jesus is a substitute for our blood then the price has been paid. The stipulation that we need to accept this sacrifice – by believing in Christ – becomes redundant. All people are automatically saved. A debt paid by someone else is a debt paid, even if the debtor doesn’t acknowledge the payment or even know it has been paid.

A moral flaw in the substitution theory serves to illustrate the ethos of the emergent movement. The substitution theory turns God back into a brutal tribal deity who set the world up so that any sin has deathly repercussions. Any image of God that demands blood is a blasphemy. Any image of God that condones blood is an idol. I cannot (and we should not) believe in a God who would demand that kind of payment.

Instead, Jesus’ death shows us what God is like, in the upside-down power of revenge not taken, a punch not thrown, and the sacrifice of his life, exposing the tyranny around him. He suffered violence instead of practising it.

Surely the arc of the Bible points away from the early Old Testament account of a tribal war God asking for blood and toward an embracing father/mother in the New Testament who sees first with the eyes of love, not judgment.

Rather than a danger, the emergent church offers a way forward. Every generation needs to make sense of faith within its own culture and its understanding is shaped by that culture. The delusion is that one particular view can be labelled “biblical Christianity” in some trans-historical way.

Much of the evangelicalism Bruce Richmond would defend is the outworking of a 19^th Century Christian reaction to challenges of secular modernism. To stay there is to continue in a story framed around and infected by that modernism, when the challenges of this day lie elsewhere.

– Murray Sheard
Auckland