No, the Early Church Did Not Teach Penal Substitutionary Atonement - David Bercot

All the good stuff that's in the penal substitution model, and most of it's good. All that the early church taught. The only thing that I'm calling bad is these four things that, you know, God had to punish somebody. He can't just forgive. And see, things like the satisfaction model, the penal substitution model, or Christus Victor, if you carry it into a model, it's trying to make sense of things, which is fine. But sometimes, in our limited human capacity, when we try to make sense of something and create a system, we've maybe made it worse than what it was.

Well, David, it's been a bit since I interviewed you last, but since that time, I interviewed Dean Taylor on the topic of the atonement. We've actually not done a lot of episodes on that topic, and he shared some things that some people very much disagreed with, and you would be one of those people. And so I emailed you and said, "Hey, would you like to come on and share some of your perspective?" And this is not going to be like a debate or, you know, trying to prove him wrong necessarily, but to provide some other pieces that you want to bring to the table about this really important topic, which is the atonement. So here we are, and I would love for you to summarize a bit of the nature of the disagreement and how did we get here and so forth, and wherever you want to go with it from there.

Okay, so I think a lot of it is misunderstanding, and that's where I'm going to be, you know, going with this. I think the important thing is, yeah, put down our swords. Let's try to understand each other, where we're coming from, because we're all serving the same God. We're all wanting to believe and follow what the scriptures are teaching about the atonement. Yeah, sometimes you get caught up in controversy and you feel like you've got to defend this position or that, and the emphasis on truth or brotherhood ends up disappearing. So I'm not here to, okay, I'm going to try to, you know, run a sword through Dean's arguments or something like that, but let's try to analyze what he said.

I think there's some misunderstandings, but I want to address both the people who didn't like Dean's presentation and those who did, and maybe help bring us all together through this. So that's where I'm going to be coming from. As I think most people know, Dean and I have been good friends for a long time. So it's maybe it's good that he and I are the ones talking about this because the last thing we are, our enemies. He very generously referred to me in his interview as his spiritual father. Well, if I'm his spiritual father, all I can say, well, he's my naughty boy.

But only on this topic, only on this topic, and I'm saying that tongue in cheek. Actually, our relationship now, I may have started out, you know, in the role of his spiritual father or mentor, but that was long ago. I mean, these days, it's definitely iron sharpening iron. And I would say I learn more from Dean these days than he probably learns from me. I mean, he is such a studious, you know, scholarly person, all the digging he does. It's the irony is I wake up this morning, I've got all these messages from Dean, and he's all excited about wanting he and I to collaborate on a book. And yes, about the Anabaptists and their view of communion and baptism.

And I'm all excited too. I mean, and we're having this WhatsApp discussion, you know, messages back and forth. And I suddenly see the time. Dean, I've got to leave. I have to do an interview where I'm going to be addressing some guy who said that the penal atonement was taught by the early Christians. You know, I said, I know, you know, you wouldn't believe that. But anyway, I've got to go do that. The irony was just we both had a good laugh out of it. So I would want the ones listening to this to know that this is all being done good-naturally. It doesn't mean that these things aren't important. I think we need to address these.

I would like to see all of us come together, not necessarily with the same view. That's not where I'm going at all. And when I, you know, I slept on this, it seems like some of my best ideas, my best thinking happens when I'm asleep. It's amazing how your mind is still going. And, you know, when I woke up, I realized that Dean and I actually might be on pretty much the same mission. We're just approaching it differently. Interesting. So like in how it's framed or the, like the conclusions that are being drawn from that? Yeah, you're framing it wrong. So let me, okay, so where we would both agree, I don't really give a lot of messages on the atonement, mainly because people get so upset if it's a different view than theirs.

So it's like, hey, there's other things that I can talk about and all of that. But when I do talk about it, I hardly ever frame it or talk about Christus Victor. And it is an aspect of it. In fact, it is the motif that they would use the most, but that's, but they've got a whole bunch of things. So if what is happening, now I have not experienced this, okay, but if what Dean is seeing is that people are so focusing on that and they're trying to put the whole atonement that you can sum it all up just with Christus Victor, with Christ's victory over Satan and the ransom, okay, if you think that covers everything, then yeah, yeah, you're missing a whole lot.

And I totally agree with you then, Dean, that, wow, we got to get away from that. There's something here that needs correcting. I don't think the answer, though, is promoting penal substitution. I think that's where he's framing it wrong, but the problem may be legitimate, or he may be sensing it is and it's not really there. And that's what I don't know. In the circles I'm in, you know, we see the whole big broad picture. In other words, if you're leaving out the blood of Christ and our sins being placed on him and the justification that we receive and God's grace and all of that, if that's not part of your atonement picture, yeah, you've got to, you're off kilter, you know.

And yeah, you and I are not on the same page, even if you're talking about Christus Victor, okay? You've got to have all of that in there. So yeah, I think that's the problem Dean is addressing. I think he gave a message once, what he called it, reductionism or something. And yeah, if people are reducing it, thinking everything has to fit Christus Victor, then they're wrong, okay? It just, the early Christians didn't try to do that, okay?

That makes a lot of sense. And that's definitely something I've heard where it's almost like a pushing too far into that to make, yeah, try to make everything fit into that framework. Yeah, it's almost like a reaction to something.

Yeah, maybe. I don't know. Obviously, I'm presuming there. Yeah, and I can't, like I said, I can't answer for everyone. But there's a quote here from Irenaeus. I really liked that I thought kind of showed the early Christian spirit. Okay, he says this, talking about Christ, his suffering gave rise to strength and power for the Lord through means of suffering, ascending into the lofty place. He's now quoting from scripture, ascending into the lofty place, led captivity, captive, gave gifts to men. That's, you know, in Ephesians. And conferred on those who believe in him the power to tread upon serpents and scorpions and on all the power of the enemy. That's from Mark. That is of the leader of the apostasy, and that's Satan he's talking about.

He said, our Lord also by his passion, that means his suffering, his death, destroyed death, dispersed error, put an end to corruption, and destroyed ignorance. At the same time, he manifested life, revealed truth, and bestowed the gift of incorruption. I mean, see, he just goes on and on. It's not one thing. It's like all of this stuff happened. And we need to keep that in mind. And so there's a little bit of Christus Victor in there about trampling on Satan. But yeah, I mean, he's not thinking that's everything. That's just part of it. And likewise, penal substitution, even if it were correct, which I don't think it is, it doesn't adequately cover all that happened for our salvation, all that happened with Christ becoming man and his death on the cross and all of that.

There were so many things at work here. I honestly don't think there is a model or a theory that covers it all. So yeah, the theory is not the important thing. And I know you shared a, you ended your interview with Dean on a quote from C.S. Lewis. If you've got that, yeah, maybe you can. So I was hoping to ask you the same thing because I read that quote with Dean and said, you know, what do you think of this? And I want to ask the same back to you. So C.S. Lewis wrote in his book, Mary Christianity, and I'm quoting here, we are told that Christ was killed for us, that his death has washed out our sin, and that by dying, he disabled death itself.

That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ's death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary. Mayor plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us. And even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself. I'm curious how you would respond to that. Oh, I mean, absolutely. Absolutely. Now, C.S. Lewis isn't right about everything. He said a lot of things wrong. And when he's wrong, I mean, he can be really wrong. Yeah. But when he's right, yeah, he has a way of saying things that are so memorable and just, you know, hits the nail on the head.

And this would be one of those examples. So absolutely, that's the whole thing. The important thing is we believe in the atonement, that we embrace it, that we know Christ died for us and we're redeemed through his blood. Now, what model helps us to grasp all of that? That's not the important thing. If it helps us, as he said, if that helps us, you know, hang all of this on something fine, where it becomes bad is then we take our model, and I condemn you because your model is a little different than mine. And so then we have to become enemies because you've got one model that makes sense to you, and I've got a model that makes sense to me.

And the irony is we both believe in the same atonement. We both believe in the same Christ, the same work of Christ, and all of that. Yeah, we're arguing for nothing. These are the models just help us to understand, maybe. But if we get too caught up in them, then actually I think they can end up doing more harm than good, which is what he's saying. You know, don't get too caught up in the model. So the important thing is that we believe all the things that scripture teach. Now, if you believe all the things that scripture teaches, you know, not adding or taking away from it, then that's what counts. And how you frame all of that, that's not what is important.

And, you know, my whole thing, of course, our ministry has been trying to help people grasp the historic faith, the early Christians, what they believed. And their whole spirit is so, it is really odd to be talking in a debate form about like what the early Christians believed in the atonement because that whole spirit is so foreign to them. I mean, they wouldn't have cared how you framed it. They would have cared if you didn't believe what scripture says.

Interesting, though, because like, isn't the tendency to systematize and build frameworks and say, this is how things are. This is the theological box for this, this, and this. Isn't that the tendency? Today. Yeah, it wasn't the tendency then. See, that's why when someone, you know, thinks they're summing up early Christianity by saying Christus Victor or the ransom theory or even penal substitution, whatever you want to do, it's a different mindset. They lived 2,000 years ago in a different world, a different culture. They didn't think they have to tie up all the loose ends of things. Just, hey, this is what we believe, this, this, this, this, this. Well, how does all that work together?

Who knows? We just believe it. There's definitely an element of mystery in what you're describing then, right? Where they, oh, here's all the different pieces, but we're not going to try to tie every single loose thread. It's okay if we don't have it all tied up perfectly. There were no arguments about the atonement from anyone. No one wrote a work on the atonement, okay? So you need to understand that we're talking about the early Christians. No one wrote, you know, the closest you would get to is in this long work of Irenaeus against all heresies. And there's maybe a chapter of that where he gives his particular view of the atonement. His intention wasn't that this did everything, but it's called recapitulation and more dealt with the incarnation and how we're also saved through the incarnation that this plays a part in the atonement.

And that's maybe the longest single stretch I can think of in any of the early Christian writings. So yeah, when people talk about, oh yeah, Chris, yeah, you got to realize that's, you know, one little paragraph usually in a discussion about something totally different. Well, I think that's what surprised me a bit too, actually, as I started digging into this. It's like, yeah, it's talked about, but it's not like there's just an overwhelming amount of material necessarily. And like all these different opinions flying around and frameworks being built, it just didn't seem like that to me. Now, I haven't read the entire set, which you can see, there's the Anicean Father set. Like it's a large chunk of text.

Right. It's like an encyclopedia, a small encyclopedia set, right? There's a lot of stuff in there, but there's not, like you're saying, these works on atonement theories. No, you get that later on after Nicaea, then you start getting the theologians and, okay, we got to nail this and that down. Now, in some senses, yeah, Origen was a theologian. He was anything but systematic, number one. Number two, anything but dogmatic. I mean, so often in his works, he'll say, he'll give this explanation of something and he says, well, that's the best I can do. Maybe someone who's got better understanding can see. Interesting. Okay. I love that spirit, you know, of, hey, they could talk about things without everybody pulling out their swords and saying, well, you're a heretic and all of that.

You had to be teaching something way off base, like the Gnostics were, before you got labeled as a heretic by the early Christians. And so when you're talking about, yeah, the early Christians believed in the penal substitution or this and that, you got to realize they just don't work in those kind of tight boxes. That's foreign to their way of thinking. I want to read to you the Apostles' Creed. Now, this was all the theology you had to believe as an early Christian to be considered orthodox. Now, okay, they believed a lot of other things, you know, but this is all you had to believe. This was their creed. And what year is this, just for context?

Probably goes back to 100 AD. I mean, we don't, I don't know where the earliest, it's, see, boy, you see it in Tertullian, you see Aspex and Irenaeus. You see, it wasn't like someone wrote it up and everyone said it the same way. It's the same elements, but, you know, a little different. This is how it's. Very, very early. Yeah, very, very early.

It could go back to the Apostles. I'm not going to make that claim, but it would be certainly in the immediate post-Apostolic era. So yeah, this represents to me early Christianity. I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.

And in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended to Hades. On the third day, rose again from the dead, ascended to heaven, sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From there, he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church or Universal Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. That's it. Now, if you don't believe that, it's because you don't believe the New Testament.

And I think every denomination that's out there, I don't care if they're Protestant, Catholic, whatever, everybody believes that. Now, they could be one because they didn't think they had to break everything out and build these frames. When you start doing that, you're going to divide Christians. It always happens.

And yeah, if we can learn to, I don't know that we can ever, as 21st century Westerners, get out of our need to put things in boxes. But if we can recognize our boxes are just mere human constructs, don't take them too seriously because that's all they are. They're boxes. They're not something God built. Okay, so the early Christians didn't feel that they had to systematize everything. Well, so if that's the case, though, just to interject there, then like what did they actually teach? You know, if there's not some systematic that this is what we believe on the atonement, for example, what model can we peg them on? Right? What do they actually say? Like what do they actually teach on the atonement in your view?

Yeah. So in my view, you know, when I compile this, you know, I've got a topic here. This is the Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs. Right. Okay. So you did that 20, 30 years ago. It's a great resource, by the way. I have it in my library. Yeah. I'm amazed it has stood the test of time because when I did this, the early Christians weren't digitized.

You know, I couldn't go through like now, boy, you can do all this research and, you know, find this and that. This was just my handwritten notes that I had compiled back in 1985 when I first read them. And then I underlined different colors. Okay. So I had all these notes on the atonement. And, you know, I would just, I think a lot of the listeners probably have this. Just go in there under what I say under atonement. And if you can find a system to all of that, well, yeah, please write me and tell me about it. I mean, it's a compendium. It's not a model. It's not a system. It's a compendium. It's this, this, this.

And then at the end of it, I say, see also blood of Christ. All right. You go there, blood of Christ. Then you get all these other ones, you know, that deal with that aspect. Fall of man, incarnation, Jesus Christ, salvation. I mean, you put all that together, wow, you don't have a system. It's, and we're going to just look at what things they did believe, but they don't fit into a system. So do you want me to go into that? Well, yeah. So like that, that is your foundational claim then for this podcast, which is saying you would not say the early church taught Christus Victor, penal substitution, whatever modern model that exists. You're saying we can't put that claim on the early church because they just didn't write and think that way.

Exactly. And I've been saying that from the beginning. And again, like I say, when I compile that, you're not going to see, oh, he fit everything into Christus Victor. You will see plenty of quotes dealing with that. You're going to see plenty of quotes that go all over. And they're all scriptural. They're just embracing everything that's in the scripture. Now, I want to read to you what I'm saying today isn't something new. Like, oh, now David has modified his view.

I first gave a series of, they were actually cassette tapes back then, you know, messages on what the early Christians believed on the atonement. It was in 1999, okay? And this is what I said. I'm quoting from myself. I don't feel any big sense of mission to change people's understanding of the atonement. I feel the essential thing is that we believe that Jesus Christ died for our sins, that he redeemed us and that we are cleansed and saved through his blood.

At the same time, the satisfaction model, which we would be calling the penal substitution model, has some weaknesses, one of which is that it's not comprehensive enough. It's easy to grasp because it reduces the atonement to a very simple model, which is understandable to most of us, but perhaps it's overly simplistic. The early Christians saw the atonement as encompassing many, many things in both the earthly sphere and the heavenly sphere, in both the material world and the spirit world.

And that's exactly what I would be saying today. I don't feel any different, you know, nearly 30 years later. It's many things they say that deal with the atonement. And it was much later in Christian history that they started trying to put this in a fixed framework. So you don't, in particularly the pre-Nicene church, I can tell you some of the things that they believed, but there's not going to be a framework to this, okay? So let me just list, there's seven aspects I list. I could say 10, I could say 12. I mean, there's a lot of things. So I'm going to. So these would be seven points that you've pulled out and you see in the Anicene Fathers, the pre-Nicene church writings, essentially, that this is what, these are things they would teach about the atonement.

This is what they teach. And then in this, I put where it differs a bit from the penal substitution model, okay? All right. They believed in the forgiveness of our sins rather than God punishing Christ in our place to satisfy his justice. Okay. So that's probably the big difference here, okay?

And we're going to be developing this, but you're not going to find a quote where they talk about God punishing Jesus because his justice had to be satisfied, okay? All right. So, but they believed in the forgiveness, God forgives their sin. Jesus gave his life as a ransom to Satan to free mankind from his power over them.

Okay. Okay. And that's, again, where it differs from the penal substitution, that they see the role of Satan that Jesus gave his life. Satan had a hold on us because man in the Garden of Eden, you know, they decided we're going to believe Satan and follow him, okay? And you know, the New Testament even says the whole world lies under the power of the wicked one, okay? So we came under his power. Now, you couldn't prove this, what I'm about to say from scripture. I'm just saying this is how they understood the ransom part of it, okay? But the ransom is only one part of it, all right? That Jesus was willing to, and his Father turned himself over to Satan.

You can torture me, kill me. You can have me, but you set free my people. And Satan was willing to do that. And that was the ransom. He held us in bondage. Satan agrees. He'll let loose at least the ones who believe in Christ. In return, he gets to have his way with Jesus and just torture and do everything he wants with him, okay? So that's where the ransom plays in, that that has been dropped, okay? That's missing in today's model. All right. The Father gave Jesus up. Not the Father punished him, but the Father gave up, gave Jesus up. This is words from scripture, to die a sacrificial death to save us. All our sins were placed upon him and nailed to the cross, okay?

So whether we go with the PSA, and I'm going to use the abbreviation ECM, the early Christian model. So PSA, Penal Substitutionary Atonement. Atonement, right? And ECM, if I use that early Christian model, okay? And model is a bad term because there's no model, as I'm saying, but these are aspects, okay?

So now we're going to get back to this later in this discussion.

When we talk about Jesus dying as a sacrifice, okay? There are two different kinds of sacrifices. There's probably more than two. All right. There's the ritualistic sacrifice that people make to placate an angry God, okay? You see that among the pagans. And a lot of people, when they hear sacrifice, that's the only way they think of it, you know? Yeah, I mean, that's kind of how I've thought about it. You know, it's just kind of your mind naturally goes there. It goes there, yeah. You know, mind doesn't anymore, but yes, it did originally, okay?

And if any of this sounds strange to, you know, a person, they're hearing things like, you know, well, believe me, it sounded strange to me. I mean, I grew up with the penal substitution model. I didn't know it was a model. I thought that's all there was. It's all I ever heard. It never even crossed my mind that there was a different view. I mean, and I read the early Christians and I mean, I was surprised. It never came out in their writings. Now, again, I didn't have a prayer. I wasn't looking for something else. I mean, I was just surprised. Well, why aren't they teaching this? And so I used to, for five years, you know, I would give messages about the early Christians.

And one of my themes was early Christianity centered on how we live, not on understanding theology. And I'd always say, these guys didn't even understand the atonement. And yet they were willing to die for Jesus Christ and to totally devote their lives to him. But they didn't even understand the atonement. I said that for five years, okay?

So like I said, this was all new to me. So one day, I was part of a Bible study group with Leonard Ravenhill, who is just, you know, this wonderful teacher. I'm blessed that I got to get included in that while he was still living.

And it was mainly pastors who were in the group, okay? So one day after we had our Bible study and prayer meeting, someone said, "Hey, do you guys want to go over to the, there was a Mexican restaurant, you know, a mile away? And hey, let's have some lunch." So I said, "Sure, yeah, let's go there." So I was still kind of new to the group. So I'm telling them about early Christianity, you know, they're all interested. And I make that same statement, you know, these guys were so committed to Christ. I mean, they were willing to die, to endure all kinds of torture for him, but they didn't even understand the atonement. And one of the brothers there, we were sitting here at a table like this in the restaurant.

His name is Winky Pratney. You probably never heard the name. This would be back from the 19, this happened, the conversation would have been about 1990, but he would have been a well-known, having a ministry to young people. He would have big conferences and stuff like that.

Extremely educated guy and really funny and fun to, you know, to be around. Anyway, so he says, "David, is it that they didn't understand the atonement or is it that they had a different model of the atonement?" And I said, "Well, yeah, I didn't know there was any different model. I thought it was just the atonement, you know?" Oh, wow. So you were at that point in time equating the penal substitution as that was the only option. Like that was the only. You're saying something else. Yeah. And that's why I was saying they didn't understand it because they don't ever talk about. That's really interesting because I'm thinking there's probably many people like that, myself included, you know?

Yeah. Well, I'd ever, and see, I grew up at Jehovah's Witness and they teach it. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. It's a little modified, but it's basically penal substitution. And then I go to Disciples of Christ. When I left JWs, they're teaching it.

I joined an evangelical church. They're teaching it. And that's when I read the early Christian writings. So every place I had been, everybody taught this. It didn't seem to be something that anyone had any controversy over, okay? There's just one way to understand the atonement. So I'd never heard of models. I didn't know there was such a thing. And then he told me, and then, well, it turned out all these guys, I mean, they were all, you know, like I say, mainly Assembly of God pastors, but, you know, all been through seminary and all that. And then they all, you know, jump in on it too. And either Winky or one of the others, and that must be his nickname.

It's a strange first name, but anyway, they say you need to read a book called Christus Victor by Gustav Allen. And that's when I, I'd never heard of that book before. Because, and then they started explaining to me Christus Victor and the ransom and all of this stuff. And I'm thinking, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That is what the early Christians were saying, but I just thought that was some weird deal, you know? Oh, wow. You were equating that with they just didn't even understand it. Yeah, yeah. And here you're, oh, that must have been a very eye-opening experience. Oh, yeah. It was, yeah. It was like, you know, there's moments in your life that end up, yeah, really changing your journey.

I mean, my main journey was, you know, to find the historic faith, but yeah, that was just one of the things that had been an obstacle. Only that I just thought they didn't understand. And of course, part of it was this, what is it, pride. I think we all tend to have that we in our modern age tend to understand things better than those guys who lived 2000 years ago. Now, right.

It's crazy when you think about it, but we understand medicine, science, math, you know, all these other things better. So it's just kind of natural to think, well, yeah, well, we understand theology better. We forget what, wait a minute. The faith was once for all handed down. It was complete at the end of the first century. And these guys lived closest to that. So yeah, they're in a better position to understand things than we are. Plus, Koine Greek is their native tongue. They're native speakers. They're not learning it in a seminary from somebody who doesn't speak it as his first language, but this was their native tongue, you know? So they're in such a better position, but I still had that pride of if that didn't fit into, you know, then they were just wrong.

So, you know, I read his book. He's a liberal Lutheran. I'm not, you know, a fan of Gustav Allen or anything like that. But yeah, his book opened my eyes, plus the conversation that, oh, there are different models. And at different times in history, the church has kind of gone, you know, and that's when I learned about the satisfaction model of Anselm, you know? And yeah, so I, yeah, it gave me a whole nother look. So then I went back and I, like I say, this had not been done yet, but I had these pages of notes from, you know, when I'd read the early Christians. So yeah, I go back and start looking at, you know, all these quotes I had pulled and saw, yeah, okay, I get what they're saying.

But I never imagined that the Christus Victor motif was everything. I mean, you know, I mean, it was like, okay, they talk about it a lot. Now I get it, but it's one of the jigsaw pieces, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that fit in. It's not the whole puzzle, okay? I mentioned that he, they believe we were going through their seven things. I was on number three. He dies a sacrificial death. Okay. So I mentioned two ways of looking at sacrifice. You know, one is, I'll say ritualistic. I started to say pagan, but I'll be fair. Let's say ritualistic, angry God, I offer up whatever to placate him, okay? The other kind of sacrifice is a heroic sacrifice, okay?

This happens all the time in war, okay? That, say, a general realizes, okay, we can't hold this position. We're going to have to retreat. One of the platoons is going to have to stay here and hold this hill so everyone else can be saved. And they're going to die. They're, you know, they're going to be sacrificed. We're going to have to sacrifice them to save everybody else. That kind of thing happens all the time in war and in other situations too, where someone lays down their life as a heroic sacrifice to save the life of somebody else. People run into a burning building, grab a child, you know, throw them out the window, you know, to people waiting, and then they're overcome by the fumes and die.

You know, they die as a sacrifice, not a ritualistic appeasing someone, a heroic sacrifice. So that's how, now the early church don't go into all these details. So those of us today who are going back trying to understand and fit all of this in, that's how we tend to understand his sacrifice as a heroic sacrifice. He gave up his life. He let Satan put him on the cross in order to free us from his bondage. But that wasn't the only thing that happened. Like I said, that's just point number three, okay? Number four, by his descent into Hades and his resurrection, Jesus conquered Satan, binding the strong man and plundering his goods. Okay. And the early Christians talk about that a lot.

Now, that is also in penal substitution. Okay. So I think from this point on, we're all on common ground. Now, a lot of people don't ever hear about Christ's descent into Hades, but if you read any kind of theological book, yeah, it's there. And Calvin, when he talks about the atonement, and he's usually the one we attribute penal substitution to, yeah, he talks about this too. So number five, Christ's blood cleanses us from sin. It doesn't just cover it. Okay. It does cover our sin. I mean, that term is used, but it cleanses us. I remember when I was evangelical hearing a preacher say, this was in a sermon, he said, "When you sin, God doesn't see your sin.

All he sees is the blood of Christ. The blood of Christ covers your sin. He doesn't see your sin." Ah. Now, that's wrong. You know, it's just hidden away. Yeah, it's just hidden. And God is so somehow blood is such a fixation that, oh, he sees Christ's blood. And that said, I don't see your sin. Well, the early church would have never said that. It's his blood cleanses us from sin, but only if we walk with him. You know, John says, "If we walk with him in the light," you know, I can't quote it from memory, but then his blood cleanses us from every sin. But we have to be walking. We have to have a living relationship with Jesus Christ for this to work.

It's not mechanical. That's going to stretch some people, I think, because that's so common. Like the blood just covers us. Yeah. I mean, in the evangelical world and especially, but in other places too, it's just the blood is the covering. The problem is it's all this is seeped in. The original Anabaptists wouldn't have said that. This is all seeping in from the Protestants and it's too bad. Again, it's not wrong to say his blood covers us, but it depends what you mean by that, you know, and the way he was teaching it, which seemed to be everyone in the church was comfortable with that, isn't right. Now, being cleansed from sin allows us to be reconciled to the Father.

So atonement means, as far as we know, comes from at one meant, you know, of bringing two people into one, to reconcile, bring them together, to make them one, okay? Our sin separates us from the Father. The sin has to be removed, not just covered over, okay? So it has to be cleansed. Once we, we're not going to ever be free from sin, but God is very gracious. You know, William Law, I love this quote, and this is from memory. God does not expect from us the obedience that an angel can give or the obedience that a perfect man can give. He only expects the obedience that a fallen human can give. So yeah, God is gracious.

He, if he required perfect perfection from us, sinlessness, yeah, no one would be saved. His grace covers us, but he does expect a response. And so we need to be walking in the light, living a holy life, but it won't be a perfect life. We still will need his grace, his Christ's blood covering us every day. All right. Now, in our initial salvation, God imputes righteousness to us. We're justified. All of our past sins are washed away. It's all put in the past. But the Protestants, and again, where they differ from the Anabaptists and the early Christians is the Protestants want to say every sin, not only all your past sins have been remitted, but every sin you commit in the future has already been pre-forgiven, okay?

Not all Protestants say that, but that's the general evangelical model, okay? And it's not the Anabaptists, but it may have creeped into our circles. Okay. The early Christians wouldn't have looked at it that way. Yes, you receive this free justification when you are saved. But as Paul says, okay, because we've been saved by grace, do we now go on sinning? May it never happen, you know? No, now God expects us to be living a righteous life walking with him, okay? So yeah, so you're hitting these points. And again, this is what it's interesting. You're not outlining like, here's their perfect framework model, you know, it all fits, everything's systematic. It's a systematic model, isn't it?

Yeah. And that is interesting. I've not heard it framed like this before. So you just did point five, right? So what's the next point? Right. Six. This we don't talk about as much, and it's not specifically part of the penal substitution model, but it wouldn't necessarily go against what they believe. Jesus became the second Adam, we all believe that, undoing our mortality and corruption and enabling us to partake of the divine nature with him. Now, the part we don't hear too much, I think it would be in the theology books of most seminaries, but it doesn't get down to the common person, is this partaking of the divine nature. So Christ, in becoming human, opened the way that we can partake of his nature.

You know, he said, unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in yourself. Now, we're not going to discuss today what that means and how that happens, but somehow, somehow we have to partake of his immortal nature. We have to drink his blood and eat his flesh, how whatever he meant by that expression. But that's also a theme the early Christians talk about a lot of our taking on the body of Christ, his nature into us. You know, the new birth isn't just a change in a legal status, okay? We become a new creature and we do have the divine nature. Peter talks about it that we become partakers of the divine nature.

So that's part of their thinking too, all right? And then the final one, Jesus taught us the ways of the Father so that we can be fitted to be eternal citizens in his kingdom, okay? So they saw the teachings of Christ, like the Sermon on the Mount and all of that, as part of the atonement. In other words, we don't get saved. We don't, again, this division between us and God, if we're going to bridge that, we're going to be one. Part of it is we need to know these teachings, these divine teachings. What are the ways of the Father? If we don't know his ways, we're always going to be distant from him. But we need to understand these teachings and they're part of it.

Now, see, the Protestants would say, yeah, works, all that, they don't play any role in your salvation. Yeah, the early Christians, that was part of it, okay? So you take these seven things and if you can think of a system, you know, you know, write me or something, you know, give some thought to this and you can, I don't know how to systematize that. All I know is these are the things that they believed about the atonement, okay? And much more, all right? So it's not like you're, again, I think this is the temptation is to come on something like this and be like, they taught whatever position. They taught Christus Victor, which is what I've heard a lot.

And then, you know, and then you have someone, you know, like Dean and others, oh, they taught penal substitution atonement, you know, or take your pick. You are just basically saying that is just not there at all. That is not correct. Those models are actually making it worse because it's trying to give us, we're trying to impose a present-day framework onto something almost 2000 years ago and it just does not fit. Right. And they didn't try to, they, like I say, I call it the early Christian model and that's a wrong term because it wasn't a model. It was, as I said, a compendium. It's all these things and their minds just didn't see the need to have to put that into a system the way our Western minds, you know, tend to want to do that.

And that's where we run into problems, I think, and then we think we have these conflicts. Now, I do want to clarify something because I think when people get upset, I mean, I had an experience. It was not an unpleasant one, and I'm glad it happened, actually. I was at the Christian Hymnary Conference, the last one, whenever it was a couple of years ago there at the Roxbury Holiness Camp. And after one of the sessions, I was walking there on the grounds and there's a gazebo, is the word I'm thinking of. And you know, there are a number of brothers sitting there and I'm just walking by because it's next to the sidewalk. Hey, David, we want to ask you something.

So sure, you know, so I go into the gazebo and sit down and then they start pounding me with questions about the atonement, you know, and do you believe Jesus died a substitutionary death for us? Well, yes, I believe that. Do you believe that we're saved through the blood of Christ? Well, of course I believe that.

They just go on with all these questions and I can tell they're amazed because somehow they got in their mind that if you believe in the early Christian model that you don't believe all these things. So I'm sure glad they asked me. I mean, it was like, and so we got through, I said, you know, in the end, this is the only difference between what I believe and what you at least presently believe.

I believe Satan put Christ on the cross, that he died there because of the wickedness of Satan. You believe it's God, the Father, who put him on the cross and he died because God was punishing him, okay? We both believe in the cross. We both believe in his sacrificial death. We both believe we're redeemed through his blood. We both believe all of our sins were placed on him and they were nailed to the cross and put away. We believe all that. It's just, you believe it's the Father who put him there and was punishing him. I believe it was Satan who put him there and he died as a way to protect us from the wrath of Satan and ransom us from the power of Satan.