While catching up on my book review reading, I came upon a review by Dr.John Habgood(Lord Habgood, formerly Archbishop of York and one of the outstanding theologians of the Anglican tradition, in my opinion), who brings together science and religion, among many other important convergences. In reviewing the work of an evangelical, Richard Turnbull, (Anglican and Evangelical? Continuum, 2008)in the TLS of March 21, 2008 (subscription required), he makes two excellent points. One is commonly held by many non-evangelicals, like myself, namely a rejection of the belief that "Scripture alone" provides the basis for the Christian faith, and he cites not only the conferring of authority on these documents by the church itself (and by implication their attribution to the church as author) but also biblical criticism and scholarship, which is the hermeneutical and textual approach I've been exploring as central to my own intellectual life.
The second important point is one that has come up often in my discussions with skeptics: the theory of what he calls "penal substitution," which he defines as the suffering and death of Jesus as the penalty for our sins, taking all of God's wrath and "making it possible for God to forgive us.) (TLS 3.21.08 at 8).Fortunatey, I was never taught this, so I take it on his (unfootnoted) word that some evangelicals believe this. He acknowledges the echoing of language from Isaiah and St. Paul, though surely this is within the tradition of prefigural language that characterized the early Jewish attempts at understanding what Jesus' death was about. In a very articulate way, he expresses it as I believe it should be expressed, as the ultimate revelation of God's love in the face of human wrath, the rejection of Jesus and his message of love. We are the wrathful ones, not God, and the cross brought forgiveness of the ultimate result of human hatreds, not a sacrifice as of old to propitiate the imagined god of the people, who had not yet built his temple in their hearts, as we are all called to do.
