Chapter 10
I am sorely tempted to go into rant mode. Once again we get the “going to heaven stuff”. I absolutely believe that salvation is about much more than going to heaven. I also believe in penal substitutionary atonement as the primary thing that the cross was about, and that this is essential so that all the wonderful stuff about the kingdom can become a reality. He says that in the gospels “almost nobody talks about going to heaven” (loc 2815). Fair enough, but then says “Almost nobody in the gospels warns about going to hell”. Almost nobody except Jesus that is! Which given the earlier arguments from Wright that we ought to pay more attention to the words of Jesus one would have thought this would have had some bearing on the matter.
At loc 3034 we get quite an amazing statement. Wright is at last answering the question of how this “forgiveness of sins”, this “return from exile” come about. And the answer is “ It comes about because Jesus dies, innocently, bearing the punishment (my italics) that he himself had marked out for his fellow Jews as a whole”. Then why on earth have you been speaking against the punishment bearing view of the cross for the previous nine chapters, explicitly or implicity?! You have some good ideas, and there is much poverty of preaching and teaching that needs to be addressed, but could you not have found a better way to do it? A less self-contradictory way to do it? Why? Because after this Wright seems to be at pains to say “but this is atonement”. Many years ago I read Leon Morris’s book “The Atonement”, the one positive out of Wright’s book is that I am going to go back and reread Morris’s book.
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