Weekend Reads: The deity and work of Christ

Who Is Jesus

By Greg Gilbert

“When someone claims to be your God, you really only have two choices, right? You can reject the claim, or you can accept it. What you can’t do, at least for very long, is suspend judgment.”

This challenge is the core of Baptist Pastor Greg Gilbert’s Who Is Jesus? (Crossway, 2015).Like C.S. Lewis did in his famous argument that Jesus must be a “liar, lunatic, or Lord,” Gilbert succeeds in framing the debate beautifully. The key issue is not whether the Gospels are reliable, whether the church is a nice organization, or whether the supernatural exists. The key question is whether you will submit to Jesus’ claim to be God.

What you can’t do, as Who Is Jesus? demonstrates at length, is try to argue that Jesus never made any such claims. On the contrary! He claimed to be the king of Israel, the “Son of God” in a Messianic sense. But more than that, He claimed to be the Son of God in an ontological sense. “Before Abraham was,” He told the Jews, “I am.” But He was also one of us. “Jesus was human, and he always will be. … Just imagine for a minute,” asks Gilbert, “how much the Son of God must have loved human beings to decide that yes, he would become a human forever.” As a man, He died, and then rose again—from the dead. Then He rose into heaven, showing that He has authority to judge and to save.

To accept Jesus’ claims, Gilbert says, is not esoteric: “There are no rites to perform, no specific words to say … you simply turn away from sin and trust Jesus, lean on him, and rely on him to save you.”

Gilbert’s challenge is accessible, and powerful. Buy one for all your unsaved coworkers.

Christ Crucified: Understanding the Atonement

By Donald Macleod

Christ Crucified: Understanding the Atonement (IVP Academic, 2014) is not quite boring. But it is arid, and, despite the topic, I had a hard time drawing the water of life from it. Some books breathe a spirit of piety. I couldn’t discern that spirit here, and the way the book lists “patriarchy” in the same category as murder, and (in passing) virtually assumes the truth of evolution, greatly puzzled me—particularly since the author, Donald Macleod, is a minister in the theologically conservative Free Church of Scotland. He interacts with and quotes a wide range of theologians, but his work averages one footnote per page, not the six or seven that mark pretensions to academic respectability.

Theologically, Christ Crucified is a straightforward defense of penal substitution, the doctrine that Christ suffered the penalty due to sinful human beings. Macleod examines the major New Testament words for the work of Christ. In English, they are rendered expiation, propitiation, reconciliation, and redemption. He examines, too, the related concepts of substitution, satisfaction, and victory. He also explains and critiques other theories of the atonement. Some hold that Christ’s death was only to make humans truly sorry for their sins (the “Moral Influence” theory); others say that it was simply to demonstrate that God takes sin seriously (the “Moral Government” theory). Contemporary Scottish theologians sometimes talk about vicarious humanity and vicarious repentance, whereby Christ literally lived the Christian life in the place of the whole human race (but somehow failed to save everyone by doing so). Every one of these theories fails to explain why Christ had to die. Ultimately, Christ died to satisfy divine justice. He bore the punishment we deserved. Macleod devotes much space to vindicating this truth against postmodern criticisms.

Christ Crucified contains plenty of truth. But for spiritual refreshment, you’ll need to look elsewhere.