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The Scriptures teach the doctrine of the substitutionary death of Christ (1 Peter 2:21-24). Isaiah 53 also predicts the penal substitutionary death of Christ. Paul in Romans 8:3 teaches the penal atonement: “God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.” The Emerging leaders, however, have a very different opinion.

“That just sounds like one more injustice in the cosmic equation. It sounds like divine child abuse. You know” (Brian McLaren, The Story We Find Ourselves In, page 102).

“And did the conservative Protestant emphasis on the death of Jesus necessarily marginalize Jesus’ life—his wise teachings and his kind deeds, which had captured my childhood imagination? Over time I began to feel as though, from my perspective, the gospel became simply an individualistic theory, and abstraction with personal but not global import. It became about the solution to a cosmic legal/business/political problem, real and serious, but a bit dry, a bit removed from real life. In my heart grew a deep, subtle, unspoken sense that something was missing, which gradually opened my heart to search for other ways of seeing Jesus” (McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy, pages 48-49).

Here is another emergent preacher’s scorn cast on the cross work of Christ whose book McLaren endorsed. It was in The Lost Message of Jesus that Steve Chalke wrote, “The cross isn’t a form of cosmic child abuse—a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed. Understandably, both people inside and outside of the Church have found this twisted version of events morally dubious and a huge barrier to faith. Deeper than that, however, is that such a concept stands in total contradiction to the statement: God is love. If the cross is a personal act of violence perpetrated by God towards humankind but borne by his Son, then it makes a mockery of Jesus’ own teaching to love our enemies and to refuse to repay evil with evil” (Steve Chalke and Alan Mann, The Lost Message of Jesus, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003, 182-183).

Steve needs to read 1 John 4:10 where propitiation is the result of God’s love: “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

Spencer Burke, creator of theooze.com and author of A Heretic’s Guide to Eternity rejects major doctrines such as exclusivism, Hell, and the substitutionary death of Christ. “Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to?” A better approach is to see Jesus as “the model of sinless living, the ultimate example to which all humanity should aspire” (Spencer Burke and Barry Taylor, A Heretic’s Guide to Eternity, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006, ix, x).

Apparently saints in Heaven have a different prescriptive on the penal atonement when they fall at the feet of Christ and worship Him in Rev. 5:9 as the “who has redeemed us to God by thy blood.”

“In light of the fact that Paul and John (and probably the author of Hebrews as well) expressly represent it as a propitiating work, it is important to recognize that Christ’s cross work had a Godward reference. The Bible plainly teaches the doctrine of the wrath of God. It teaches that God is angry with the sinner, and that this holy outrage against the sinner must be assuaged if the sinner is to escape his due punishment. It is for this reason that a death occurred at Calvary. When we look at Calvary and behold the Savior dying for us, we should see in his death not first our salvation but our damnation being borne and carried away by him” (Robert Reymond, A New Systematic Theology of The Christian Faith, Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1998, page 639)!

N. T. Wright is probably the most prominent and influential of the New Perspective theologians. Nicholas Thomas Wright is a British New Testament scholar and the Anglican Bishop of Durham, England.

For that reason, John Piper wrote an entire book, The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright, exposing the errors of the New Perspective on Paul.

There is a connection between the New Perspective on Paul and the Emerging church. The Emerging church leaders have read the New Perspective on Paul theologians. For example, Emerging church leader in England, Steve Chalke, has read N. T. Wright. N. T. Wright admits that Steve Chalke, in his controversial book, The Lost Message of Jesus, where Chalke denies the propitiation of Christ, “embarrassingly at times—the book follows quite closely several of the lines of thought I have myself advanced, though giving them a good deal more energy through shrewd use of anecdote and illustration” (N. T. Wright in a 2007 Internet post quoted by Piper on page 49 in The Future of Justification). What is ironic is that N. T. Wright has written strongly in favor of the propitiation of Christ. Here is a sample:
“The idea of punishment as part of atonement is itself deeply controversial; horrified rejection of the mere suggestion has led on the part of some to an unwillingness to discern any reference to Isaiah 40-55 in Paul. But it is exactly that idea that Paul states, clearly and unambiguously, in Romans 8:3, when he says that God ‘condemned sin in the flesh’—i.e. the flesh of Jesus. Dealing with wrath or punishment is propitiation; with sin, expiation. You propitiate a person who is angry, you expiate a sin, crime” (N. T. Wright, The Letter to the Romans, 475-476).

John Piper makes this appraisal of further comments that Wright makes on the same page that seems to contradict his other statements about penal substitution. “In view of this assertion that God propitiated the anger of God, it is mystifying that Wright would construct the following sentence in this context: ‘It should go without saying that this in no way implies, what the start of the verse has already ruled out, that God is an angry malevolent tyrant who demands someone’s death, or someone’s blood, and is indifferent as to whose it is’ (The Letter to the Romans, 476).”

Piper responds to Wright’s mystifying statement. “What is subtle and misleading about this sentence is that it starts with the denial of pejorative things about God and then ends up denying, with no distinction, things that Wright himself has affirmed. The sentence is written in such a way as to make Wright’s own true view almost unrecognizable. What is to be denied and what is not? Is God angry: Yes. Is he malevolent: No. Is he a tyrant? No (too many false connotations), but he is certainly totally in charge. Does he demand someone’s death? Yes. Blood? Yes. Is he indifferent as to whose it is? No. This is not a helpful way to explain what one thinks. It seems to me that he undercuts with this sentence the force of what he has spent great effort defending from the text of Romans” (John Piper, The Future of Justification, 52).