I’ve just finished my review of Stephen R. Holmes, The Wondrous Cross: Atonement and Penal Substitution in the Bible and History (for Anvil) and there are a few comments that I wasn’t able to include in my review, due to space limitations.

First of all, it’s a great book. Stephen is lecturer in theology at St. Andrews University, and a Baptist minister. We’ve never met, but I’ve listened to him at a conference of the Society for the Study of Theology. If I’m not mistaken he’s a former student of Colin Gunton, and they were colleagues at KCL for a while. Oliver Crisp commends Stephen on the back cover as ‘one of the most interesting and thoughtful younger theologians at work in the UK today.’ That creates some expectation!

Although the book is written for a popular audience, it makes it pretty clear that we are dealing with a very skilled theologian. Obviously, Stephen knows not only theology, but how to teach theology. The book is abounding with examples, effective without exception.

Given the controversy raging in the UK over Steve Chalke’s and Alan Mann’s The Lost Message of Jesus (also translated into Romanian) I was interested to see which side Holmes would take. To his credit, he comes out firmly in favour of penal substitution, but without taking sides, or at least without making any enemies!

The idea is that all theories of atonement are useful as metaphors, or rather models, that help convey a mystery (the Wondrous Cross). The claim that distinguishes him from, to take one prominent example, Don Carson is that these models should not be controlled by an overarching model. That’s because the Bible doesn’t give any impression of such a control. Don Carson wants to allow other models, but under the control of penal substitution. On the contrary, writes Holmes, ‘the Bible just doesn’t look as though it is trying to give us one central truth of how Jesus saves us, with lots of supporting illustrations - that’s not just the way it’s written.

Actually N. T. Wright also wants to have a ruling model: Christus Victor (see his Jesus and the Victory of God). While I think that he is quite right to urge us to set those metaphors in the context of the Biblical story, I think he underestimates that while there is a biblical history, a Heilsgeschichte, the Bible itself does not have the coherence of one single story, but rather includes different stories, all about the same thing, but from different perspectives. This problematises his claim that we should subsume the variuos metaphors under the one story. Which one story?

A theme running through this book (but also to be found in Kevin Vanhoozer’s The Drama of Doctrine) is that these various stories we tell work (when they do) because of various background assumptions. The assumptions that are in force in a given culture, or period, may not be so in the next. Holmes shows (though with very little elaboration given the nature of the book) why the theory of penal substitution could be in fashion especially between 1600-1800. So the question: should we still speak in terms of penal substitution, or abandon that talk, because it has become incoherent?

This is where Holmes treads on thin ground, I think, because he allows socio-cultural experience to set the agenda for theology. His opinion is that actually the contemporary cultural situation still makes talk of penal substitution possible (with minor adjustments - the talk is difficult, but not irrelevant), so we can continue to employ this vocabulary. But, although he doesn’t say it, there is no telling what the next cultural episteme will bring. It may be that 50 years from now whatever assumptions that still make the story plausible today, will no longer be there. No problem, we’ll switch to other stories, Holmes will say.

But what if there comes an age, where no biblical metaphors, or any models that make use of these, will remain intelligible? That is, in principle possible. We’ll just switch to non-biblical metaphors and models. There is nothing in Holmes’ prose to prevent us from doing that. He is actually quite relaxed about it. But in being so I think he flaunts one major insight of metaphorical theology: he thinks that the content delivered by the metaphor can be separated from its metaphorical vehicle. We thus have acces to that content, and then pick other more contemporary images, to deliver that content. ‘But we have to work at trying to understand what it was that those metaphors communicated, and judge any new metaphors we might find by how well they, in turn, communicate the same things.’ (83).

So not only can we prise apart the vehicle from the content, contemplate that content in all its nudity, but we can also find other metaphors that are able to convey it. This looks like the theory that holds that metaphors can be perfectly paraphrased. I am not sure Gunton would have approved of this.

To return to the question of the place of socio-cultural experience, the problem that I see exemplified here comes down to the fact that the cross has always been a scandal. It never really made any sense anyway! Thus, the answer to the question of whether there will be an age when these metaphors and models will become outdated, unintelligible, is that it’s always been like that. If we try to read the cross through socio-cultural experience, if we expect that experience to highlight real aspects of the work of Christ, we forget the insight (at least voiced by Holmes too) that it is human experience itself that should be read through the cross, not the other way around.

Putting it like that makes it look too simple. It assumes a naive realism where we unproblematically perceive the cross and then compare it with human experience, as if we do not draw on the same human experience in understanding the cross. Thus the problem is not that Holmes has turned socio-cultural experience into a criterion for theology, he hasn’t yet worked out an adequate balance between these two forces: on the one hand, the prevenience of the cross, on the other, the indispensability of experience.

The question, then, is, how to make the scandal of the cross intelligible? My own inclination is to treat the Biblical metaphors themselves as foundational, as bedrock. There is no access to the facts that they describe, or to the content that they deliver, save through the metaphors themselves. God has been gracious enough to provide us in Scripture not simply with a nude content, which is experience free, passion free, purpose free, but rather with a normative stance towards God, Jesus, salvation and so on. The metaphors that Scripture uses engender a perspective, a stance, a perfomative (not simply a propositional) attitude and orientation towards what is revealed. Given the constitutive nature of those experiences and metaphors, I simply don’t think it is possible to get beneath them. We tried and we failed.

Why not treat those very metaphors as foundational? Does this end up with a sterile biblicism? It could. But this does not mean that improvisation is impossible. But what guides this improvisation is not the vision of a pure content, but a primordial and normative performance. That’s the Scriptural performance.

There is a propositional element in this - as far as it can be - not one that can be isolated from the affectional and the performative, but one that is only made possible through it. It is not at all accidental that Jesus held that he is the truth.