Christus Victor and Penal Substitution Blog

Hi and welcome to the new webpage/blog!

You'll still find all the familiar content here in the "Articles and Essays" sidebar on the right, plus I've added a blog to chronicle the researching and writing of a book on the Atonement I am working on based on a four part essay that you can read here called "Penal Substitution vs. Christus Victor". At the time I had no idea it would be such a popular essay. But it apparently touched on a nerve in people and positive responses flooded in. So I expanded the essay with new sections, until finally I decided I needed to make this all into a book to really flesh out the ideas. There have been over the years lots of book criticizing Penal Substitution, but next to none that offered a biblical alternative from an Evangelical perspective with a high view of Scripture.

So I've been working on taking the essays and adapting and expanding them into book form. A big part of that has involved reading everything I could on the Atonement. If I was going to take on a major doctrine of my Evangelical faith I wanted to make sure I was critiquing the most intelligent version of that doctrine I could, rather than a straw-man, so I could know whether the doctrine itself needed to be revisited or it simply needed to be better stated. After I read around 70 books and had developed things quite a lot I decided it would be fun to start a blog and share some of the stuff I'd been reading and thinking.

Theology is ultimately something that should be done in community, and a blog seems like a great way to get that interaction and feedback. So I look forward to any comments.