I was tempted to call this Sola Scriptura. For there are many who challenge the word of God, and accuse the Reformed of worshipping a book. We do not. And we are aware of the problem of interpretation. But David Robertson points out the errors in this within a debate.

He is a Scot, so pray for his Soul: his nation is run by fascists.

Now I’m sorry but I’ve met people who have had some really nutty interpretations of Scripture and I’m going to say that to them. The reason I can say that is because the best way to interpret Scripture is through Scripture. I accept that Peter talks about how there were some people who would take it that the Scriptures, the writings of the Apostles Paul – and it’s interesting that he called them Scripture – and says that they distort them as ignorant and unstable people do. And there are plenty of ignorant and unstable people. But I am still going to come back and say, yes we will disagree about interpretation but is God not capable of giving us a Word in which he speaks clearly and reveals himself to us? And I think he is. I think the wonderful thing is that he gives us such a variety within that Word that we will disagree about secondary issues but primary issues, fundamental issues if you like, you can’t disagree about. Somebody could say that the Bible says there is no God. Well the Bible does say that. That’s Psalm 14:1, except the first part of that sentence is the fool says in his heart there is no God. That changes it. So I think it’s actually not that difficult to read the Bible.

You said it inspired you and so on. It doesn’t inspire me. Dostoevsky inspires me. JK Rowling may inspire some people. I don’t know, Dundee football club inspire me. Scotland rugby team inspire me to despair. How are we inspired? The Bible says of itself that it is God’s inspired word to us. Not that we are inspired to understand it but that it is sure and certain. And I keep coming back to this. George Whitfield when he came to Scotland used to love the fact that when he was in Scotland he preached to 10,000 people and he would announce a text and he would hear the rustling of 10,000 Bibles. Why? Because people were looking to check that he was speaking the truth. If you don’t have an authoritative Scripture, you actually don’t have an authority to be able to communicate and preach the Word of God and you just end up preaching your own opinions or the culture of the society. And I honestly believe that’s where Scotland has gone wrong in terms of the church. That’s why the church is in so much decline, because we used to be known as the land of the people of the book and now, we’ve just become the land of Rabbi so-and-so says this, minister so-and-so says this. And honestly, young people aren’t interested. Why should they be? We need the Word of God which is the word of Jesus and I believe that’s the Scripture.

Why did he need to state this? Obvious is obvious. As Robertson said at the beginning of this — I’m a Free Church Minister, but I’m not going to bag the Church of Scotland. I am going to talk about what the Church of Scotland, and the Catholics, and the Orthodox believe. The fundamentals: all else is gloss and commentary.

The reason is postmodernism. As if Paul had not met it. This minister of the Kirk of Scotland is defending why he finds preaching that Christ died to pay for our sins offensive.

So here in Scripture itself, we have different understandings and different models, and in church history, different models, but they don’t all take us to penal substitutionary atonement. And one of the things I think that is a scandal about the gospel, and Paul echoes this when he talks about Jesus being cursed of God, is that context is everything and in the first century, God’s were with the powerful, with Caesar, with people of wealth and status. And here – this is the scandal – is that God was in the criminal and in the person who was crucified. And Jesus is “the cursed of God”, that means he’s outside the covenant. Not just a Gentile, He’s outside the covenant. So anyone, the marginalised, the poor, the sinners, everyone. So when we say Jesus died for all, the gospel means not just for Caesar and his friends but for all of us. And that’s the scandal of the gospel.

I realise that we are really running out of time now here actually. We should have had about six nights on this. There are real issues about words like ‘ransom’ and ‘sacrifice.’ There were plenty of ways in which people could have their sins forgiven without a blood sacrifice. Most of the sacrifices at the Temple had nothing to do with sin. Nothing to with sin at all. And Jesus teaches his own disciples. He says to them forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. No blood sacrifice. He taught his disciples that you can have your sins forgiven by prayer, by penitential prayer, by repentance, by acts of charity. So there are alternative models available.

My point is that David’s view – the Calvinist reformed view – is there and that’s fine. But there is a whole spectrum of other views within the church. There are 300 million Orthodox Christians, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and on the whole they do not subscribe to penal substitutionary atonement. They don’t look at the doctrine of The Fall the way that we do in the West. So I think that 300 million probably outnumbers the Free Church and the Church of Scotland by quite a way.

Well, this postmodernist misses the point. The Atonement, our salvation, is bigger than any model. As one Papist blogger — who dislikes Calvin and considers that he said Christ was guilty — points out, the payment in the Old Testament was a sacrifice: Christ took our place.

Just as every sin we commit, no matter how secret, harms the entire Body of Christ, a similar ‘stain’ comes upon God’s Holy Dwelling place in the midst of a sinful and unclean Israelite nation. Thus it is the High Priest’s duty to perform a most sacred rite, going before the Mercy Seat (the Lid of the Ark of the Covenant) in the Holy of Holies, and thus make atonement for all Israel.

Once one realizes the role of the priest in “bearing the iniquity of the people,” carrying this over to the New Testament we see Jesus’ role as High Priest in a more mature light. Clearly, when texts like Isaiah 53:11 and 1 Peter 2:24 speak of Jesus “bearing our iniquity,” it refers to His role as High Priest taking on the burden of making atonement for other people. Thus, in “bearing sin” Jesus was not “guilty” in our place. This can be seen even in the contexts of Isaiah 53 and 1 Peter 2:24, which I’ll briefly turn to.
In Isaiah 53:6, it says “the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” It turns out, this same Hebrew word for “laid” is used a few verses down, in verse 12, “he makes intercession for the transgressors.” That same Hebrew word is translated to mean “make intercession,” showing clearly that “make intercession,” and “make atonement for” are synonymous with “bearing sin,” which vindicates the Catholic reading of Isaiah 53:11.

I’m coming back to Robertson’s first quote for a second. There are plenty of Catholics, or Reformed, or Orthodox who have fallen into an error of believing the model overmuch, and not seeing it as an imperfect way of approaching a truth that is much greater than we can comprehend.

But the liberal makes a bigger error. He throws the truth away. This is why I tend to hang around Crunchy Calvinists and Catholics and the more Obnoxious Orthodox. They know there is a truth there. We try to understand it. We know that there is two thousand years of theological speculation on this. But… we have scripture, written by men inspired by God, to guide us. We all turn to that.

But the post moderns, who as Robertson pointed out, just reflect the fashion of this nanosecond.