The End of Christianity (56 page)

3
. Ibid.

4
. Ibid.

5
. John MacArthur, “Open Theism's Attack on the Atonement,”
Master's Seminary Journal
, Vol. 12, no. 1 (Spring 2001), 9.

6
. Greg Bahnsen, “Penal Substitution,”
Penpoint
4, no. 2 (March 1993), 1.

7
. J. I. Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve: The Logic of Penal Substitution,” Tyndale Biblical Theology Lecture, 1973, available online:
http://www.the-highway.com/cross_Packer.html
.

8
. Anthony Quinton, “On Punishment,” in
Philosophical Perspectives on Punishment
, ed. Gertrude Ezorsky (State University of New York Press, 1972), 7.

9
. Ibid., 10.

10
. Mark Murphy, “Not Penal Substitution but Vicarious Punishment,” in
Faith and Philosophy
26, no. 3 (July 2009), 255–57. Murphy argues for vicarious punishment, by which he means that the guilty are punished by seeing the suffering caused to the innocent. This position has its own problems. See
http://formerfundy.blogspot.com/2010/08/mark-murphys-view-of-atonement.html
.

11
. Paul Bloom, “The Moral Life of Babies,”
New York Times
, May 5, 2010.

12
. Charles Feinberg, “The Image of God,”
Bibliotheca Sacra
129 (1972): 246.

13
. Norman Mcllwain,
The Biblical Revelation of the Cross
(Oakwood Publishing, 2006).

14
. Charles Hodge,
Systematic Theology
(Charles Scribner, 1872), 2:532.

15
. Another problem with trying to detach sin or demerit from guilt and punishment is stated by Stanford Burney:

But substitutionists reverse this natural order of the relation between crime and punishment, making the removal of the reatus poena antecedent to the removal of the reatus culpae—that is, exemption from punishment is the antecedent of deliverance from criminality. Hence, the sinner was pardoned, released from all liability to penal suffering when Christ became his substitute but was left in his criminal and polluted state; morally corrupted by, but not liable to, the divinely ordained consequence of his corruption! At enmity against God, yet not liable to the consequences of that state of enmity. Such a state of things, it is self-evident, is impossible in the sphere of either physical or moral law. It would be possible only in the sphere of human law, and possible here only because of the inherent weakness of human law. Thus, a man commits a malicious murder, is indicted and tried by the proper court; but, by the bribery or death of witnesses or by corrupting the court, he procures a verdict of acquittal and is set free. This verdict operates as a barrier against subsequent prosecution and punishment. This is exactly the state in which substitutionary satisfaction puts all for whom Christ died. His death absolutely delivers from reatus poena, but leaves them in the meshes of reatus culpae

Quoted from Stanford Burney,
Atonement Soteriology: The Sacrificial, in Contrast with the Penal, Substitutionary, and Merely Moral or Exemplary Theories of Propitiation
(Cumberland Presbyterian Publishing House, 1888), 113–14.

16
. William Joseph McGlothin, “Sacrifice, Human,”
The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia
, ed. James Orr (Howard-Severance Company, 1915), 4:2658. For a thorough study of the practice in the ancient Near East, see A. R. W. Green,
The Role of Human Sacrifice in the Ancient Near East
(Scholars Press for the American Schools of Oriental Research, 1975).

17
. “Pass through the fire” in the King James Version is rendered “sacrifice in the fire” in the New International Version and “give to be burned as a sacrifice” in the New Living Translation.

18
. David Dilling, “The Atonement and Human Sacrifice,”
Grace Theological Journal
12, no. 2 (Spring 1971): 25. On Yahweh's original endorsement of human sacrifice in the Old Testament, see Hector Avalos, “Yahweh Is a Moral Monster,”
The Christian Delusion
, ed. John Loftus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010), 226–27.

19
. Dilling, “Atonement and Human Sacrifice,” 26–27.

20
. Jeffrey et al.,
Pierced for Our Transgressions
, 21.

21
. I have used sin(ners) because as I understand the Bible, God's wrath is not focused against sin in the abstract but against sin as it manifests itself in human beings, that is: sinners.

22
. The Greek word (or its cognate) occurs four times in the New Testament (Rom. 3:25; 1 John 2:2; 1 John 4:10; Heb. 2:17). C. H. Dodd argued that the word is better translated “expiation,” but most scholars have sided with Leon Morris in translating it as “propitiation.” See C. H. Dodd,
The Bible and the Greeks
(London: Hodder&Stoughton, 1935), 82–95; and Leon Morris,
The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross
(London: Tyndale, 1955), 144–213.

23
. See also 1 Peter 2:24; 2 Corinthians 5:21; and 1 John 2:2.

24
. John H. Leith,
Creeds of the Church
, 3rd. ed. (Louisiville: Westminster John Knox, 1982), 35–36.

25
. Martin Luther,
Select Works of Martin Luther
, trans. Henry Cole (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1826), 4:365.

26
. John Calvin,
Institutes of the Christian Religion
, 2.16.10 [translation by Ford Lewis Battles, in John T. McNeill, ed.,
Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion
(Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 1960)].

27
. Hodge,
Systematic Theology
, 2:473.

28
. Loraine Boettner,
The Reformed Faith
(Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1983), Section III (“Christ's Atonement”). [Editor's Note: It makes no sense, of course, how a few hours in hell are equal to an eternity in hell. Were that the case, then by definition an eternity in hell would not be necessary to satisfy justice and would therefore be a gratuitous evil for God to allow. So either hell is not eternal (for anyone), or Jesus did not assume the actual punishment for human sin and thus cannot have atoned for any of it, much less all of it.]

29
. Jurgen Moltmann,
The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 174–75. Theologians have described the relationship between the members of the Trinity in terms of
perichoresis.
Moltmann explains:
[T]his concept grasps the circulatory character of the eternal divine life. An eternal life process takes place in the triune God through the exchange of energies. The Father exists in the Son, the Son in the Father, and both of them in the Spirit, just as the Spirit exists in both the Father and the Son. By virtue of their eternal love they live in one another to such an extent, and dwell in one another to such an extent, that they are one…. The unity of the triunity lies in the eternal perichoresis of the trinitarian persons.

30
. A. T. B. McGowan, ed.,
Always Reforming: Explorations in Systematic Theology
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2006), 199.

31
. Rustin Umstattd, “A Trinitarian Crucifixion: The Holy Spirit and Substitutionary Atonement,” paper presented at the 2008 annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in Providence, Rhode Island.

32
. Some Christians may object that what has been said in this paper does not apply to their view of the atonement. All views of the atonement, however, hold that in some way the suffering and death of an innocent person makes it possible for man to receive salvation. Thus, all views of the atonement share at least some of the problems associated with the PST.

33
. Tertullian, “De Carne Christi,” in the
Ante-Nicene Christian Library: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325
(Elibron Classics, 2005), 15:173–74.

34
. Marlene Winell,
Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion
(Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications), 75.

CHAPTER 8

1
. Stephen Law has done an excellent job of putting his finger on the problems with this kind of response: see “Going Nuclear” in Stephen Law,
Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011), 97–110.

2
. In my forthcoming book
The Case against Christ
I will consider a wide range of challenges that undermine Christian belief. Consider the millions of miracle claims alleged about Lourdes, France. The Catholic Church has officially recognized sixty-seven of them. A rough estimation of the general reliability of human miracle testimony from Lourdes comes out to be a mere .0000167. That is, in general, when humans give miracle testimony, their reliability is orders of magnitude worse than it needs to be for us to even provisionally accept it. This dismal fact alone seriously undermines the acceptability of early Christian reports about the miracles of Jesus.

3
. Apparently “arational” is not a commonly recognized word, but it should be.

“Irrational” means contrary to the dictates of reason. By “arational,” I mean outside or without reason, and I leave open for the moment whether believing arationally is also irrational.

4
. Richard Carrier, “Why the Resurrection Is Unbelievable,” in
The Christian Delusion
, ed. John Loftus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010), 291–92.

5
. Here's a tiny portion of empirical evidence about the effects of desire on belief formation and evidence gathering, from Jonathan Baron's
Thinking and Deciding
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988): E. Babad and Y. Katz, “Wishful Thinking—Against All Odds,”
Journal of Applied Social Psychology
21 (1991): 1921–38; L. A Brenner, D.J. Koehler, and A. Tversky, “On the Evaluation of Onesided Evidence,”
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making
9 (1996) 59–70; D. Frey, “Recent Research on Selective Exposure to Information,” in
Advances in Experimental Social Psychology
, ed. L. Berkowitz, vol. 19 (New York: Academic Press, 1986): 41–80; A. Lowin, “Approach and Avoidance: Alternative Modes of Selective Exposure to Information,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
6 (1967): 1–9; W.J. McGuire, “A Syllogistic Analysis of Cognitive Relationships,” in
Attitude Organization and Change
, ed. M.J. Rosenberg et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960), 65–111; E. Pronin, T. Gilovich, and L. Ross, “Objectivity in the Eye of the Beholder: Divergent Perceptions of Bias in Self versus Others,”
Psychological Review
111, no. 3 (2004): 781–99; N. Weinstein, “Unrealistic Optimism about Future Life Events,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
39 (1980): 806–20; J. C. Weeks et al., “Relationship between Cancer Patients’ Predictions of Prognosis and Their Treatment Preferences,”
Journal of the American Medical Association
279 (1998): 1709–14. See also the chapters by Valerie Tarico and Jason Long in Loftus,
The Christian Delusion.

6
. Some of the influential arguments for the historical resurrection can be found in: N. T. Wright,
The Resurrection of the Son of God
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003); Richard Swinburne,
The Resurrection of God Incarnate
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Gary Habermas,
The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ
(Joplin, MO: College Press, 1996); William Lane Craig, “The Bodily Resurrection of Jesus,” in
Gospel Perspectives I
, ed. R. T. France and D. Wenham (Sheffield, England: JSOT, 1980), 47–74; and “The Historicity of the Empty Tomb of Jesus,”
New Testament Studies
31 (1985): 39–67; Tim McGrew and Lydia McGrew, “The Argument from Miracles: A Cumulative Case for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth,” in
The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology
, ed. W. L. Craig and J. P. Moreland (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 593–662.

7
. Gary Habermas, “The Case for Christ's Resurrection,” in
To Everyone an Answer: A Case for the Christian World View
, ed. Francis Beckwith, William Lane Craig, and J. P. Moreland (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 180–98.

8
. Ibid., 194.

9
. Ibid., 195.

10
. For example: Vaughan Bell, “Ghost Stories: Visits from the Deceased,”
Scientific American
, December 2, 2008, at
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ghost-stories-visits-from-the-deceased
; A. Grimby, “Bereavement among Elderly People: Grief Reactions, Postbereavement Hallucinations, and Quality of Life,”
Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica
87, no. 1 (January 1993): 72–80; W. Dewi Rees, “The Hallucinations of Widowhood,”
British Medical Journal
4 (October 2,1971): 37–41.

11
. For a start, see: C. Chabris and D. Simons,
The Invisible Gorilla and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us
(New York: Crown, 2010), 45–46; Daniel Greenberg, “President Bush's False ‘Flashbulb’ Memory of 9/11/01,”
Applied Cognitive Psychology
18 (2004): 363–70; Elizabeth Loftus,
The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse
(New York: St. Martin's/Griffin, 1994); Ulric Neisser and Nicole Harsch, “Phantom Flashbulbs: False Recollections of Hearing the News about
Challenger
,” in
Affect and Accuracy in Recall: Studies of “Flashbulb” Memories
, ed. Eugene Winograd and Ulric Neisser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 9–31; D. L. M. Sacchi, F. Agnoli, and E. F. Loftus, “Changing History: Doctored Photographs Affect Memory for Past Public Events,”
Applied Cognitive Psychology
21 (2007): 1005–22; J. M. Talarico and D. C. Rubin, “Confidence, Not Consistency, Characterizes Flashbulb Memories,”
Psychological Science
14 (2003): 455–61; K. A. Wade et al., “A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Lies: Using False Photographs to Create False Childhood Memories,”
Psychonomic Bulletin and Review
9 (2002): 597–603; Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt,
Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2008).