Atonement Theories & Guilt, Part 2: “Don’t Make Me Feel Guilty”: How Penal Substitution Interferes With Reparations and Reconciliation

Mako A. Nagasawa

The Starting Point:  Thabiti Anyabwile’s Concern for White Supremacy

In this series of blog posts, I am exploring the impact of atonement theories on human emotional development.  In particular, I am comparing Penal Substitutionary Atonement and Medical Substitutionary Atonement.  The second emotion in this series is guilt, and this post is the second in the subseries on guilt.  Here, I examine Thabiti Anyabwile’s call to white evangelicals to reexamine the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and four responses of white evangelical Penal Substitution advocates who criticize his article. 

Thabiti Anyabwile pastors Anacostia River Church in Washington D.C.  He has authored several books and blogs at The Gospel Coalition, which is self-described as

“a fellowship of evangelical churches in the Reformed tradition deeply committed to renewing our faith in the gospel of Christ and to reforming our ministry practices to conform fully to the Scriptures…”[1]

By referring to “the gospel of Christ,” The Gospel Coalition means this:

“on the cross he canceled sin, propitiated God, and, by bearing the full penalty of our sins, reconciled to God all those who believe… By his sacrifice, he bore in our stead the punishment due us for our sins, making a proper, real, and full satisfaction to God’s justice on our behalf.”[2]

In other words, The Gospel Coalition is Reformed and insists on Penal Substitutionary Atonement.  I will expand on these definitions later.  This theology is important to note up front, though, because Thabiti Anyabwile’s critics argued that he betrayed it.  How did he supposedly do this?  By calling for racial justice in fairly specific ways that are unusual for the Reformed tradition.

On April 4, 2018, Anyabwile, who is African American, posted a blog on The Gospel Coalition website entitled, “We Await Repentance for Assassinating Dr. King.”  April 4, 1968 was the day Dr. King was assassinated.  Anyabwile posted his article on this day, fifty years later, to point out that King’s assassin, James Earl Ray,

“acted with the encouragement of a white society dedicated to the advantage of whites above all others and simultaneously the segregation, oppression, and exploitation of black people. Ray acted with the assistance of whites who suppressed their consciences. He acted with the assistance of anti-Civil Rights propagandists and white-collar country club segregationists. He acted with the assistance of a FBI COINTELPRO campaign charged with discrediting, maligning, and silencing voices of Black dissent. These parties acted in concert, in the same direction, against Dr. King and by extension the millions of African Americans hoping for some larger piece of freedom’s promise.”[3]

It's reasonable to think Anyabwile expects his readers to know certain historical facts.  He refers to “a white society.”  He is not only speaking of which racial population was the largest.  The “white society” that Anyabwile speaks of had legal power to block the rights of non-white people.  Of course, the U.S. not only seized Native American lands, but also regularly broke treaties with Native American tribes.  African Americans did qualify as citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment, but at the state level, faced Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination in full violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which the nation had lost the moral and political will to enforce.  “White” was defined by the Supreme Court in the Ozawa (1922) and Thind (1923) cases as Caucasian not in the scientific sense, but according to what was popularly understood in the U.S. by other “white” people.  The circular legal definition first excluded from citizenship Ozawa for not being Caucasian, and then Thind, who was from the Caucasus region yet Indian and therefore not “white.”  The cases had real consequences:  Thind was unable to maintain his ownership of a house; other Indian Americans were evicted or lost their properties.[4]  People of Asian and other descent had no legal protections.  Only “white” people could enjoy full citizenship and property ownership.  And “whiteness” was legally controlled by the insiders, not just in the Jim Crow South, but nationally.  This was the environment Dr. King confronted.

Anyabwile also expects his readers to know a few things about James Earl Ray.  One need not even believe the theories that swirled around James Earl Ray -- theories that Ray assassinated King with help from the government, the Memphis police, and/or white supremacist forces.  One need only glance at what is factually known. 

James Earl Ray, a troubled young man, was drawn to the presidential campaign of George Wallace, governor of Alabama and an avowed white supremacist with a segregationist platform.  Supporters of Wallace’s campaign surely “suppressed their consciences,” as Anyabwile suggests.  They would certainly count as “anti-Civil Rights propagandists and white-collar country club segregationists.”  In late 1967 and 1968, Ray volunteered at Wallace’s campaign headquarters in North Hollywood, California.[5]  He said later that he thought George Wallace would be elected President and pardon him.

For the sake of thoroughness, let me remind readers of the following facts.  It was April 4, 1968.  The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 had been passed only recently, making the U.S. a truly multi-racial democracy including women, for the first time in its history.  Although many white people sided with King and were sympathetic to the black American struggle, a massive white backlash had already been growing. 

In policing and law enforcement, justice was racially selective.  Of course, Dr. King addressed this, including with his own body, by taking police beatings and going to prison.  If you paid your taxes, you were funding the FBI’s subversive COINTELPRO actions, cited by Anyabwile, and depending on where you lived, the local police who beat Civil Rights marchers. 

In the housing, banking, and employment sectors, racial segregation was still the central principle administered illegally through realtors’ professional associations, the Federal Housing Authority and the GI Bill’s mandated redlining and racially biased risk assessments.[6]  Dr. King addressed this, even traveling to California to speak against California’s segregationist realtors and Proposition 14.[7] 

In education, Southern white evangelicals were continuing their resistance to Brown v. Board (1954) by setting up private “segregation academies,”[8] mirroring racial segregation patterns in schools in the North.[9]  Dr. King addressed this, starting as early as 1947 when he was an undergraduate at Morehouse College in an article in his campus newspaper about the importance of education, [10] and again in 1964 when he reflected on how little had changed after the 1954 Brown v. Board ruling.[11]  The Constitutional basis for Brown v. Board was the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.  It is hard to argue that the racial exclusion and economic inequalities present in America’s public school system, then or now, constitute equal protection or equal treatment under the law.  But notice that Anyabwile contains his argument to the past.  By the end of his article, he will barely hint at the present.

In politics, a realignment was occurring which would try to dismantle the gains of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.  Dr. King addressed that.  As late as 1967, he spoke of the “white backlash” which refused to pay to get rid of poverty, slums, and quality education for everyone.[12]

In government programs, more public tax-payer money was given to white America through Defense Department contracts than to welfare programs.  Dr. King addressed this, too, when he expanded his concern to labor and therefore the white working-class, and also criticized America’s involvement in Vietnam as an imperialistic venture that drew money away from the education of America’s children. 

Lest we somehow credit the U.S. with passing more Civil Rights legislation than it did, and when, let’s remember this:  Only in the wake of the civil unrest following King’s assassination on April 4 were LBJ and Congress able to pass the Fair Housing Act of 1968 to formally chip away at the white supremacist housing system that was,[13] and still is,[14] so entrenched in the United States.  The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which was created to enforce the Fair Housing Act, was immediately gutted by Nixon.[15]  Prior to the Fair Housing Act, there was nothing challenging the entrenched economic structure of racism in the housing market.  To passively accept that system without speaking against it and acting against it in some way is to indicate approval.  Anyabwile, while not as specific as this, is factually correct.

Anyabwile then points out how the strain of Civil Rights activism had taken a physical toll on Dr. King, and how Dr. King predicted that he would be assassinated:

“I’m saying the entire society killed Dr. King. This society had been slowly killing him all along. Taylor Branch, King scholar and award-winning biographer, pointed out that Dr. King at the time of his death, though only 39, had the heart of a 60-year old. He suggests, I think legitimately, that the stresses of the Civil Rights Movement and of pervasive Jim Crow hostility showed itself in the 20-year aging of Dr. King’s heart. Dr. King himself knew the slow death of white supremacy would give way to a sudden violent end. Following the assassination of President Kennedy, Dr. King commented to his wife, Coretta, “This is what is going to happen to me also. I keep telling you, this is a sick society.”[16]

Premature aging under stress is a medical and scientific fact.  Anyabwile was reasonable to point this out.  So anyone who resisted the changes that Dr. King worked so hard to bring about did contribute to the conflict he felt, which took a toll on his body. 

Anyabwile insists that we speak of Dr. King’s death as an assassination, and not merely a death, because anything less sanitizes the white supremacy in American society at the time, and also now:

“I don’t need all white people to feel guilty about the 1950s and 60s—especially those who weren’t even alive. But I do need all of us to suspect that sin isn’t done working its way through society.”[17]

“My white neighbors and Christian brethren can start by at least saying their parents and grandparents and this country are complicit in murdering a man who only preached love and justice.

“If we’re serious, then we can go on to commit ourselves to laying down our lives for others as Dr. King did. After all, the King of Kings said, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).”[18]

Anyabwile explicitly says that he doesn’t “need all white people to feel guilty about the 1950s and 60s.”  However, many white evangelical PSA advocates read Anyabwile as if he is saying that they should feel guilt and be motivated by it.  That is a central aspect of their disagreement.  They accuse him of betraying the fundamental truth of Penal Substitutionary Atonement.  Are they hearing things?  Or are they picking up an important emotional subtext that Anyabwile is struggling to not insert but which resonates anyway in a lower register? 

Anyabwile proposes that his Christian readers be motivated by love.  For him, guilt and love are emotional “motivations” that exclude one another.  In this, I disagree with him:  In my understanding of Scripture, love is not reducible to “a motivation.”  In Scripture, love is a commitment and actions consistent with that commitment (e.g. 1 Cor.13), where guilt can actually serve a constructive but limited role (e.g. 2 Cor.7; Ps.51; etc.; cf. the previous blog post on guilt).  Guilt, if it is “a motivation,” is not, strictly speaking, mutually exclusive with love, a topic I addressed in the previous post.  Apparently, however, Anyabwile’s evangelical audience shares his understanding, and/or Anyabwile must feel he has to present “motivations” this way.  This by itself is important to point out, because people should wonder how that came to be.

Anyabwile concludes by saying that accurate historical memory is vitally important.  After all, Scripture regularly admonishes us to remember the past accurately, whether we are remembering God’s faithfulness or our own unsavory actions and fallen condition (Ephesians 2:1 – 3, 12). 

Is Anyabwile’s invitation particularly difficult or unreasonable?  “Complicity” is not the same as “direct causal agency.”  And Anyabwile gives an indication about what he means by “complicit” earlier.  Giving “assistance” to evil is complicity, like paying taxes that fund racially discriminatory police and FBI agents.  Even if you have no choice but to pay your taxes, in a democracy, citizens have the moral obligation to speak out and work for change.  That is how complicity is offset.  And it is a fact that many white Americans designed patterns of housing discrimination across the country, and looked the other way when Southern states blocked black citizens from voting during the Jim Crow era.  Yes, passivity in the face of evil is complicity.  However, many readers of Anyabwile’s article rejected the idea of complicity in the assassination of Dr. King.  For them, only James Earl Ray was directly responsible for it.  People are individuals, and responsibility for actions is purely individual. 

Anyabwile treads lightly when he says that we should “suspect that [this] sin isn’t done.”  Did he mean that, fifty years later, the same social and racial conditions that led to the assassination of Dr. King still fester?  Although very muted, Anyabwile surely means that.  Donald Trump was President at the time Anyabwile wrote his article, having been elected despite, or perhaps because of, his prejudicial actions (e.g. not renting to black tenants at his family’s real estate properties in compliance with the Fair Housing Act[19]; calling for the Parkland Five to be administered the death penalty in 2014 and 2016 despite them being exonerated in 2002[20]), remarks (e.g. maintaining the birther lie about President Obama; saying that Judge Gonzalo Curiel cannot properly do his job because of his Mexican heritage[21]), and policy proposals (e.g. Muslim ban).  In August 2017, Trump could not bring himself to condemn the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, instead saying, “There were fine people on both sides.”  Then in March 2018, one month before Anyabwile wrote, the New York Times spotlighted Trump’s decision to not carry out the Fair Housing Act, which was having the effect of reinvigorating and further ensconcing “decades of racial, ethnic and income segregation.”[22]  All this information was publicly available when Anyabwile wrote.  Yet no one who criticized Anyabwile acknowledged this.

Guilt, Love, and Atonement

Can we move from guilt to love?  Do we ever do so?  My blog posts are about the experience of guilt – why we feel it, what we do about it, how different atonement theories impact what we do with that feeling, and whether we grow through it and from it.  America’s racist past and present are only one reason people might feel guilt; there are many other reasons unrelated to race, which I will also explore in this series of posts.  In a moment, I will examine a few responses of white evangelicals – in particular, those in the Penal Substitution camp which Anyabwile inhabits himself – and how they responded to him. 

I will also show what Anyabwile has to do with Scripture and theology in order to accommodate his concern for racial justice while laboring in the framework of Penal Substitutionary Atonement.

Besides the question of complicity, controversy erupted over whether Anyabwile was being consistent with his earlier teaching, with Christian mission, and with Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA), which those in his own theological camp defined as “the gospel” in its very essence.

I found many reactions online to Anyabwile, and will sample from them to show this consistent pattern. 

Response #1:  Pulpit and Pen

The News Division of Pulpit and Pen published a post on April 5, 2018, one day after Anyabwile published his own article:

“So then, in Anyabwile’s anti-Gospel article at the social justice blog, he refused to acknowledge or apply the concepts of Christ’s atoning death or the imputation of sin and righteousness. Instead, Anyabwile – in a perverted sense – imputed the sins of our fathers (which is an illogical jump and unfair, if not a flatly stupid, assumption about our fathers) to us, and demands that we give him, and other[s] of our black brothers, an apology. Of course, we have given many such vicarious apologies that never should have been offered to begin with (because that’s not how apologies work). The Southern Baptist Convention is in a nearly annual cycle of making such apologies. It’s time for Ron Burns to demonstrate the Gospel by accepting the good (and unnecessary) gestures of contrition from his white brothers and let…it…go. That’s what Christ’s worthwhile atonement (as opposed to MLK’s worthless, pointless death) accomplishes; forgiveness.”[23]

Much can be said about this response, but I will keep my comments brief.  The writer at Pulpit and Pen calls Thabiti Anyabwile by his previous name, Ron Burns.  Later in July 2019, Pulpit and Pen will call him a militant racialist, an angry Black Nationalist, because Anyabwile took that name before he came to Christ while he was in a Black Nationalist phase of his life.  Pulpit and Pen insisted Anyabwile change his name back to Ron Burns, not considering that he might simply prefer an African over an Anglicized name regardless.[24]

Pulpit and Pen flatly rejects Anyabwile’s appeal to white evangelicals, doing so first and foremost by waving the banner of Penal Substitutionary Atonement.  They call his article “anti-Gospel.”  They assert that “he refused to acknowledge or apply the concepts of Christ’s atoning death.”  This is important to notice.  They will not be the last to do so.

Is this purely a coincidence or a non-sequitur?  Is there something about the logic of Penal Substitutionary Atonement itself that encourages acidic responses like this?  Is there something about PSA which, perhaps may not require us to call Dr. King’s death “worthless [and] pointless” in comparison to Jesus’ death, but opens the door to doing so?

To pursue the answers to these questions, I will examine other responses to Anyabwile that supplied more reasoning.

Response #2:  Debbie Lynn Kespert

Debbie Lynn Kespert maintains a blog site calls The Outspoken TULIP.  The acronym TULIP refers to the five points of Calvinism.  She provides her own statement of faith agreeing with the Calvinist tradition,[25] and also quotes from and links to “What is Reformed Theology” on the GotQuestions.org website.[26]  She further links to the doctrinal statement of First Baptist Church in Weymouth, Massachusetts.[27]  She describes herself as a woman in her 60s whose passion is to teach Scripture to other women.[28] 

On April 13, 2018, Kespert replied to Thabite Anyabwile in a post titled, “Are White Evangelicals Guilty Of Assassinating Martin Luther King, Jr?”  This was the fourth post in a series she wrote about race and Christian faith.  Though I disagree with the substance of what Kespert says, and how she interprets Scripture, I admire her willingness to share publicly her own life and thinking on these topics.  I found her writing style to be respectful and courteous.  I reproduce this fourth post in full:

“I’ve spent all week trying to articulate how Christians should respond to racism. I’m not certain I’ve done the greatest job of handling this topic. Most of the time, I’ve felt as if I was trying to put pantyhose on an octopus.  As I remarked Monday, writing on racial issues as a white woman[29] pretty much sets me up for accusations of racism, white privilege and any other invectives liberals might care to hurl my direction.

So I worked hard at my attempts to acknowledge[30] that American blacks have suffered mistreatment. That mistreatment sometimes affects their perception, causing them to cast unfair judgments such as when the young man in the nursing home bit my head off for calling him “boy.” I continued by arguing that I am grieved and embarrassed because of actions that my great-great-grandfather and my grandmother took, but that God doesn’t hold me responsible[31] for their sins.

I’ll add today that, regardless of Thabiti Anyabwile’s demand that white evangelicals repent of our complicity in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (please, I was only 14 at the time!), such demands are unbiblical and unnecessarily divisive. It both puzzles and saddens me that Anyabwile, a prominent figure in Reformed circles, would write something so opposed to the foundations of the Protestant Reformation.

In requiring that white evangelicals repent of our parents’ and grandparents’ supposed participation in King’s assassination, Anyabwile seems to ignore basic Gospel teaching. Those evangelicals who are truly saved (and my regular readers know that many evangelicals are false converts) have experienced complete forgiveness at the cross.

13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14 by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. 15 He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him. ~~Colossians 2:13-15 (ESV)

Certainly, we must daily confess and repent of sins we commit after the Lord saves us, but Jesus paid the penalty even for those. If we’ve engaged in racist attitudes and/or behaviors, by all means we should repent! You can be sure I’ll never call a young black male “boy” again!

Yet even in our sorrow over sin, we mustn’t wallow in guilt.  Continual penance looks back to Roman Catholicism and its endless efforts to remain in a state of grace. Worse, repenting for the sins of ancestors, grandparents and parents for their roles in slavery, Jim Crow laws and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. seems all too reminiscent of buying Indulgences to free loved ones from Purgatory.

Has Anyabwile forgotten that we can’t atone for our own sins, much less the sins of our parents and grandparents?  If so, he has forgotten why the Reformation happened in the first place! I would hope that he would go back into church history and brush up on Martin Luther and the 95 thesis.

And as long as he is studying history, I suggest that he think about Martin Luther King’s Dream Speech. Rather than holding white evangelicals accountable for King’s assassination, perhaps he should see us as individuals. Perhaps he should judge us, not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our individual characters.”[32]

Kespert begins autobiographically.  When she moves to the substance of her reasoning, however, like Pulpit and Pen, Kespert argues that Anyabwile is not being faithful to Penal Substitutionary Atonement.  The foregrounding of this theological concern is, again, important, fascinating, and troubling.

Kespert thought she and Anyabwile shared in common a rootedness in Penal Substitutionary Atonement.  What is striking is that Kespert, while polite, suggests that Thabiti Anyabwile has not truly repented, and is not truly an evangelical.  By the logic of her PSA framing, Kespert suggests that Anyabwile is not among “those evangelicals who are truly saved.”  Why?  Because he “seems to ignore basic Gospel teaching.”  Anyabwile’s demand is “unbiblical and unnecessarily divisive.”  His teaching is “opposed to the foundations of the Protestant Reformation.”  He does not seem to have “experienced complete forgiveness at the cross.”  How is that evident to her?  Because apparently in Kespert’s opinion, he does not extend “complete forgiveness at the cross” to white evangelicals. 

If we accept PSA, then what would we make of Kespert’s argument?

PSA and Individualism

Kespert rejects any corporate or systemic responsibility for white supremacy.  She is not unique in this.  That pattern puzzles observers because she, like the broader Reformed tradition, holds that we inherit the guilt of Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God in the fall.  Called the federal headship of Adam, it asserts that we participate in the moral responsibility and failure of an ancestor.  While the fallenness of humanity is understood biologically-spiritually and the white supremacist origins of the United States are understood sociologically, could this serve as a conceptual tool, or a parallel? 

The answer is no.  Because PSA makes personal guilt central, it exerts a psychological and spiritual force in reverse:  all guilt must be personal.  See below for more on that.  Therefore, racism, too, must be reducible to personal actions.  Notice that Kespert also interpreted racism as something related to her direct, personal behavior.  She confessed that she used the term “boy” without knowing how African American men were regularly insulted and diminished by white supremacists before.  To her credit, Kespert is candid and sincere about learning from that experience.  Her public post indicates that she is willing to be held publicly accountable by anyone else on this matter, which is commendable. 

So part of the reason why PSA makes it hard for its adherents to grasp communal moral failure, or ongoing moral complicity in a social system, or reparations for historic injustice, is because guilt is assigned to individuals.  In other words, it is not actually possible to make a parallel between the federal headship of fallen Adam and white supremacy in the United States.  The mechanisms of transmission are different.  The mechanisms of participation are different.  As Kespert illustrates, Penal Substitution dictates the terms of how we should assign moral responsibility.  Moral responsibility is individual because rebellion against God; though it is “imputed” to others, “imputation” may or may not be a legal device pertaining to how God views individual people.  Regardless, moral responsibility originates personally, and is expressed and re-expressed personally.

PSA operates on individuals and for individuals.  Penal Substitution insists that only individuals can receive Jesus and benefit from his atoning work.  A community cannot.  The human race cannot.  A racial group cannot.  Only an individual person can make such a choice.  In fact, arguably, PSA serves psychologically to help us become truly individual, liberating us from the massa damnata, a Latin phrase which in Reformed thought is the corporate mass of humanity that remains damned by Adam’s fall.

Thus, Kespert seems unwilling to interpret racism as something related to the structures of economic and political power, bolstered not just by patterns of speech but by income taxes, property taxes, gerrymandered voting lines, the limited political options we face in the U.S., and the like, all resting on top of stolen land and wages.  Regardless of the fact that possession of stolen property, and not simply stealing itself, is a crime, many evangelicals seem unwilling to consider that basic point.  Probably the moral guilt of possessing stolen land and labor is simply too overwhelming.  This more expansive interpretation of racism raises troubling issues for how any given individual does in fact participate in a larger society – a society with a history, and families who have passed down wealth intergenerationally.  Do white evangelicals have a peculiar responsibility to change society?  Not on the terms that Anyabwile proposes, and not with the motivation of history.

PSA and Emotional Development

More importantly, PSA has an effect on people’s emotional development and formation.  Kespert has an allergic reaction to the feeling of guilt itself.  She protests, “Has Anyabwile forgotten that we can’t atone for our own sins, much less the sins of our parents and grandparents?”  She says this despite Anyabwile’s explicit denial that that is what he means.  Kespert objects that we can feel “sorrow over sin,” but we cannot “wallow in guilt.”  Kespert says that true repentance is an experience of “complete forgiveness at the cross.”  Basically, Kespert defines “forgiveness” as “forgiveness from God for all my wrong-doing, past, present, and future.”  So anything less diminishes what Jesus himself endured at the cross.  If Kespert were to allow herself to feel guilt for something, and be moved to act because of that guilt, she could only interpret herself as being unfaithful to Penal Substitutionary Atonement. 

There is a deeper reason, then, why PSA makes reparations, communal moral failure, and moral complicity with systems difficult, if not impossible to accept: difficulty processing the emotion of guilt into PSA theology. Significantly, Anyabwile did not name possession of stolen property as the most relevant moral and legal personal category, satisfying the criteria of personal sin and personal guilt.  But PSA advocates seem to have a hard time considering it, which perhaps he knows.  Why?  Because PSA requires that guilt for all a person’s sin – past, present, and future – be entirely shifted over to the person of Christ.  When an individual person receives the atoning work of Jesus as understood in PSA, all of that person’s guilt is considered to be taken away by Jesus.  All of it.  Otherwise, Jesus’ work was not “complete.”  But if you own stolen property, then you are guilty of that sin and you must atone by returning it.  This produces a conundrum which Anyabwile has not yet named, but lies in the background.

Even more significant is this:  When Anyabwile makes Kespert feel guilty, who is at fault?  Kespert believes he is.  For Anyabwile to suggest that there is some guilt leftover for which Kespert as an individual person must acknowledge, grapple with, and help undo raises very troubling emotions for her about him.  Kespert’s mind goes immediately to Roman Catholic practices of wallowing in guilt, continual penance, endless efforts to remain in a state of grace, buying indulgences, and purgatory.  For Kespert, if Jesus did not take on all her guilt, especially for something so vast as the United States’ racism, then her feeling of guilt would be never-ending.  She would be trapped in something like psychological and spiritual forced labor.  Or perhaps she feels like she would be vulnerable to psychological and spiritual manipulation. 

This is why PSA cannot truly coexist with other theological and biblical points:  The issue is about emotional development and what we believe about it.  Other Christians – Reformed and otherwise – have suggested that “Christus Victor” or other understandings of atonement, and/or other aspects of biblical teaching, can come alongside PSA to help Christians understand moral failure on the communal or systemic level.  Some have said that their approach to atonement is “kaleidoscopic.”  Or that atonement is really a collection of varied “motifs” in Scripture that are not actually integrated together aside from the fact that they all appear within Scripture.  But Kespert and the other PSA adherents I examine here demonstrate why these proposals do not work, and will not work, until PSA itself is dismantled and set aside.  PSA creates a completely different understanding about how we as human beings should process feelings of guilt and culpability, and what a person needs to do about it.  If there is a team of pastors and preachers, those who believe guilt is an important emotion to feel and process will not be in agreement with those who believe PSA disallows it.  The way PSA conditions people to avoid the emotion of guilt presents a roadblock. 

Consider what Kespert probably believes about reparations as a policy idea.  In all likelihood, Kespert believes that reparations are not due to African Americans in any practical sense, and not due emotionally from white American evangelicals in the sense that they would support it, advocate for it, and vote for it.  Why do I say that?  Because in October of 2019, more than a year after his article of April 2018, Anyabwile argued that reparations are biblical, and are due to African Americans; to that article, Kespert did not reply.  Nevertheless, consider her response as of April 2018.  When Anyabwile called white evangelicals to repent of their complicity in the assassination of Dr. King, what was he asking for?  Anyabwile explained himself.  Statements: confessions; acknowledgements; etc.  That is, by any account, mild, almost meaningless in the eyes of some.  Anyabwile then reminded Christians of their call to love one another, which is vague enough to be general, but important to Anyabwile because he thinks of love as a motivation that displaces guilt as a motivation:  Can any of us say that we have “fulfilled” Jesus’ call to love one another?  Certainly not.  Anyabwile probably believed he had stood on solid ground.  “Loving one another” can certainly be informed by what people have suffered in the past.  Yet to that relatively mild call, informed by some sober history, Kespert replied by questioning Anyabwile’s biblical literacy, credentials as a true evangelical, and fidelity to the Reformation.  It is not unreasonable to assume she opposes reparations, the actual shifting of power, money, and resources.

PSA and Reading Colossians 1

To support her case, Debbie Kespert reads Colossians 2:13 – 15 from the English Standard Version.  My response to her citation will illustrate why PSA winds up bending the interpretation of biblical passages like this one.  The ESV says:

13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14 by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. 15 He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him. ~~Colossians 2:13-15 (ESV)

Doesn’t that support Penal Substitutionary Atonement?  Isn’t the biblical case for PSA solid?  No.  I disagree with Kespert’s choice of translation, truncation of the quote, interpretation of the quote, and application to the issue at hand. 

As to choosing this translation:  The English Standard Version has a remarkable bias towards Penal Substitutionary Atonement and patriarchy.  That bias is present in this passage.  It is not incidental that Kespert relies on the ESV.

As to truncating the quote:  Kespert amputates the passage, reflecting a further bias.  She should start her quotation earlier, not least because Paul himself begins 2:13 with the connecting phrase, “And you.”  This phrase means Paul is building upon a thought that he made just prior to 2:13, involving “circumcision.”  How far back should we go?  Grammatically, the sentence begins in 2:8, but there is also material before 2:8.  Paul begins his proclamation of Jesus in the majestic passage, 1:15 – 20, and includes Jesus’ impact on us on either side of that proclamation, in 1:13 – 14 and 1:21 – 23.

As to interpreting the quote:  Paul teaches Medical Substitutionary Atonement, not least in Colossians.  I’ll provide some exegetical notes here.  Paul introduces Jesus as the author of both creation and new creation – as “firstborn of all creation” (1:15 – 17) and also “firstborn from the dead” (1:18 – 20).  Jesus brings about a new creation “in himself” by his death and resurrection, bringing about, for the original but fallen creation, reconciliation and peace with God (Col.1:20, 22). 

But this is critical:  God did not reconcile Himself to us.  In Christ, God reconciled us, and specifically, human nature, to Himself.  That is a major difference between Penal and Medical Substitutionary Atonement theories.  In the former, God exhausts divine retributive justice to the satisfaction of the Father, leaving God at peace with us.  In the latter, Jesus exhausts the strength of the corruption of sin which had been lodged like a disease in his human nature, leaving human nature at peace with God.  In PSA, the atonement is located in the divine.  In MSA, the atonement is located in the human. 

Paul describes the latter in Colossians.  Notice Paul’s focus on the change in the human.  We “were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, in evil deeds” (1:21).  “Yet,” Paul explains, “he has now reconciled you in his fleshly body through death, in order to present you before him holy and blameless and beyond reproach, if indeed you continue in the faith firmly established and steadfast, and not moved away…” (1:22 – 23).  In other words, where was the “hostility”?  In God, towards us?  No:  The “hostility” was in us, towards God. 

Jesus accomplished the remarkable transformation of the human.  Jesus utterly exhausted and overcame the “hostility” to God within human nature, and brought about within his human nature “peace” with God in place of “hostility,” reconciliation with God in place of alienation, which exists now in his resurrected body.  But how?  In the PSA framework, we are supposed to feel emotional gratitude for Christ’s work of removing our guilt, which is supposed to be the sufficient emotional motivation to produce holy living.  Isn’t that what Paul is talking about here?  No.

PSA Misses an Organizing Idea in Colossians:  Circumcision of the Heart

To explain how Jesus transformed the human, Paul stresses the fact that Jesus had a “fleshly body” which he took “through death.”  When Paul uses the term “flesh” in these contexts, as he did in Romans 7:14 – 25, he means “the evil which indwells me” and “the corruption of sin within human nature.”  He does not simply mean “physical human matter.”  “Fleshly” has a specific Jewish meaning, and Paul demonstrates that he is thinking about this Jewish meaning later when he uses the visceral imagery of “the circumcision of Christ” (2:12).  Paul is already thinking in Colossians 1:21 – 23 about the surgical, medical nature of Jesus’ atoning work where “flesh” is cut away.  Bodily circumcision of the male penis was expressed in the language of the cutting away of flesh (Gen.17), along with the shedding of blood, implicitly.  But already in the Pentateuch, God began to use bodily circumcision as the conceptual anchor point for “circumcision of the heart” (Dt.10:16).  Israel would not be able to actively obey God faithfully enough to cut away the corruption of sin from the human heart.  Therefore, God declared that He would “circumcise their hearts” (Dt.30:6) in association with returning Israel from exile back into the fullness of garden life.  

So how should we interpret Jesus’ crucifixion and death?  Did Jesus satisfy the retributive justice of God?  Did he endure the judgment of the Father so that we would not have to?  No.  Jesus wielded death as a surgical instrument against the corruption of sin within his humanity.  Paul interprets Jesus’ bloodshed and death through the lens of circumcision.  Jesus cut away something impure. 

Lest we think Paul is haphazardly joining two “motifs” together in a sloppy fashion, we must observe how the book of Genesis already joined the practice of circumcision and an example about “death-to-life” in the story of Abraham and Sarah.  God brought Abraham and Sarah from old age (Gen.12) to very old age (Gen.17).  They were both, without any doubt, reproductively dead when Abraham was 100 and Sarah was 90, at the time their son Isaac was supernaturally born.  Abraham may have believed that God would bring about a son from his loins as early as Genesis 15:6.  But Abraham and Sarah had to become absolutely “dead” reproductively, via old age, and still believe that God would do such a supernatural thing as bring forth life out of death, and that was when God gave the sign of circumcision to Abraham (Gen.17). 

Not only that, Abraham and Sarah had to volitionally “die” to other reproductive alternatives that were sinful.  In other words, God had to cut away sinful attitudes and beliefs in them — with their partnership — to bring forth new life through them.  First, Abraham had apparently suspected that God made a promise to him without regard to Sarah as his wife (Gen.12:10 – 16); God had to cut off that thought from Abraham’s mind as God made clear that Abraham had to honor Sarah as his wife, not tell the half-lie that Sarah was his sister (Gen.12:17 – 20).  Second, Abraham thought he could do as any patriarch of his time could do, and name a male heir (Gen.15:1 – 3); God had to cut off that thought from Abraham’s mind as well (Gen.15:4 – 6).  Third, Sarah and Abraham thought that they could do as any matriarch and patriarch of their time could do, and use a surrogate mother, Hagar (Gen.16:1 – 17:18); God had to cut off that thought from them by insisting that Sarah would be the biological, not merely the legal, mother (Gen.17:19).  Abraham and Sarah had to “die” to all the other culturally acceptable ways of becoming legal parents.  Since God wanted them to be a restoration of Adam and Eve in some sense, living again in a garden land, they would have to trust God the way Adam and Eve did not, and have a son-heir they way Adam and Eve should have.  God called them to embody “new creation.”  For, volitionally, in the story of Abraham and Sarah, death led to life.  Abraham, in particular, had to “die” to male privileges that his culture gave him.  Which is another way of saying that he had to partner with God in cutting off sinful attitudes and beliefs from himself.  It is no wonder that God, after cutting off male privileges from Abraham, told Abraham to cut off a piece of physical flesh from his own penis.  It was the sign of Abraham’s quite active, not passive, obedience.  For Abraham and Sarah, the whole purpose of entering biological and reproductive death was to cut sinful beliefs away from themselves.  Then and only then would God bring forth new life in them and from them.

Since circumcision already supplied the inner meaning to “death to life” and “new creation,” it was appropriate that circumcision would continue to be associated with those things, culminating in the story of Jesus.  God and Moses related “circumcision of the heart” to Israel’s partnership with God.  God called Israel to internalize His commands so as to cut away the corruption of sin itself, which would be the ultimate form of returning to the garden, and becoming God’s true humanity, and therefore the highest form of “death to life” and “new creation.”  God’s call on Israel to be God’s people in God’s garden land was marked by circumcision, the cutting away of sinful attitudes and the source of sin in each person.  However, Israel would not be able to fully cut away the corruption of sin, so God called them to hope for the day when God would do it, in some way, in tandem with bringing Israel back from exile into their garden land (Dt.30:6).  Thus, Jesus was Israel’s medical and surgical substitute, through his active obedience.  He was the one true Israelite who lived faithfully unto the Father – what the Mosaic Law and Sinai covenant called for – and brought about “circumcision of the heart” through his own death and resurrection.  This is perfectly consonant thematically with Abraham and Sarah.  Therefore, it is not at all haphazard for Paul to perceive that meaning, too.  Paul uses “circumcision of the heart” and Jesus’ active, not passive, obedience, as the way to interpret Jesus’ death and resurrection (Rom.2:28 – 29; 6:6; 8:3 – 4).  Said differently, “circumcision of the heart” is the inner meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection.  This is Medical Substitution:  Jesus shared in our fallen humanity, so that we might share in his healed humanity.

The PSA advocate will object:  But isn’t divine forgiveness based on Jesus exhausting God’s wrath and bearing the punishment we deserved?  No.  And this question allows us to tie up Colossians 1:13 – 14 to 15 – 20 and 21 – 23 into one complete whole. 

Paul had introduced this section by first speaking of “forgiveness of sins” as God transferring us from one domain to another (Col.1:13 – 14).  That is because the Greek word “aphesin,” translated into English in 1:14 as “forgiveness,” properly means “dismissal of, remittance of, sending away, release from.”[33]  So in 1:14, Paul speaks of the dismissal and remittance of sin, the sending away of sin, and the release from sin.  Of course he does:  For Christ is the only human being who has dismissed the corruption of sin from his own humanity, sent it away from himself, and released his human nature from it.  No wonder that Paul in 1:14 speaks of us being transferred from one domain to another.  That new domain is “in Christ,” that is, within the one human being “in whom we have redemption, the dismissal and sending away of sins.”  The “sins” Paul speaks of there is Adamic fallenness, and all the things we have done individually to corrupt our human nature further (cf. Eph.4:17 – 19; Rom.1:21 – 32). 

In ordinary terms, here is how that sounds:  As a mortal man, Jesus sent away sins from his human nature, through his perfect human faithfulness to the Father, and ultimately by wielding death as a weapon against the corruption of sin.  He killed the thing that was killing us.  And in his resurrection, Jesus rose with a purified and perfected human nature.  He shares himself with us by his Spirit when we receive him.  And we must say simultaneously that when we receive him, he receives us into himself by the Spirit.  We come to be “in him,” and likewise he sends sin away from us.

PSA and Reading Colossians 2

Keeping Colossians 1 in mind, we can now engage with Colossians 2, which Kespert quotes, where Paul expands on our participation in Christ.  Jesus accomplished, and accomplishes, “circumcision of the heart.”  Notice also that circumcision of the heart is a surgical and medical action taken within our human nature.  Conceptually, it agrees with the meaning of the Greek word “aphesin.”  God sends something away from us:  the corruption of sin.  Correspondingly, God heals us.  The surgical-medical framework of Medical Substitutionary Atonement makes the vital distinction between us and the corruption of sin within us.  The Western legal framework of Penal Substitutionary Atonement can only conflate the two. 

“Circumcision of the heart” refers to the transformation of the human, first in Jesus himself and then in us.  The fact that “the circumcision of Christ” in 2:12 can be read as what Christ himself did/experienced in himself (the subjective genitive) and also the work Christ does in us (the objective genitive case) is very significant.  I believe the ambiguity is intentional:  The phrase contains both meanings.  But the former meaning is built on the latter.  The “circumcision of the heart” accomplished in us is built on the “circumcision of the heart” accomplished by Jesus in himself.  Or, rather, our “circumcision of the heart” is our participation in the new humanity of Jesus which he reproduces in us through a human journey much like his.

In fact, Paul says, we die and rise with Christ.  Once again, this dying and rising in union with Christ is anchored in MSA, not PSA.  In PSA, Jesus died instead of us, which is supposed to produce emotions of guilt-relief and then gratitude that God will not torture us infinitely.  In MSA, Jesus died ahead of us, which is supposed to produce emotions of hope that we might be transformed in accordance with God who calls us into His goodness by putting to death the evil that is in us.  Jesus’ death was a death that was open to us in principle, and we are transformed by our participation in his death and resurrection by the Spirit, “through death,” as Paul said in Col.1:22.  Paul will continue expanding on our participation in Jesus’ death (2:20) and resurrection (3:1ff.) by referring to an old self and a new self that is being renewed (3:9 – 10).  All this is rooted in an understanding of what Jesus did to his own human nature as an advance of what he does in ours.  Jesus did not die instead of us; he died ahead of us.

How we interpret Jesus’ death and resurrection is controlled by the Jewish idiom “circumcision of the heart” (Col.2:11 – 13; Dt.10:16; 30:6; Jer.4:4; Rom.2:28 – 29) and now a second, complementary, idiom:  the taking away of “the handwriting which was against us” (Col.2:14).

Protestants often equate this “handwriting which was against us” with the curses of the Sinai covenant.  Our cultural experience probably contributes to that tendency:  In the Latin-influenced West, law operates as an adversarial system, with legal standards menacing us from the outside.  But that view is hard to align with the positive statements Paul makes about the Sinai covenant elsewhere.  In Romans, Paul says that God gave the Sinai covenant to Israel as a spiritual health regimen to help Israel diagnose the disease of sin (Rom.7:7), even though the corruption of sin resisted it (Rom.7:8 – 13).  The Sinai covenant nevertheless helped the Jewish people understand their inner struggle:  there is an “I myself” that was indeed made in the image of God, which still “wants to do good” in joyful agreement with God, and also a parasitic disease, “the flesh, the sin which indwells me, the evil present in me” which desires otherwise (Rom.7:14 – 25).  The Sinai covenant was meant to help Israel; the corruption of sin within us opposed it, and “weakened” its purpose (Rom.8:3).  One must understand the disease in order to better hope for the cure, and the one who would be the cure, who would share himself with us by the Spirit, since the “requirement of the law” was in fact “circumcision of the heart” (Rom.8:3 – 4; 2:28 – 29).  In Galatians, Paul says that the Sinai covenant was a “tutor” meant to lead people to Christ (Gal.3:24).  So the Sinai covenant per se was not actually against Israel or against humanity. 

What was against us?  The “sinful handwriting” which Jeremiah said was on our own hearts (Jer.17:1 – 10).  The idiom of “writing on our hearts” was another Jewish idiom that referred to our human being – human becoming.  God wanted Israel to be the “scribe of the heart.”  He wanted them to partner with Him by overwriting the script of sin which came from the fall, and instead write His commandments there (Dt.6:4 – 9; Prov.3:3; 7:3).  Jeremiah deployed this image when he saw that the Israelites of his generation had written sinfulness so thoroughly into their hearts, it was indelible (Jer.17:1 – 10).  However, Jeremiah used the image again in the great prophetic passage about the new covenant:  the Lord God will write His law on people’s hearts, not on stone tablets (Jer.31:31 – 34; Heb.8:7 – 13).  Paul deployed the idiom positively when he said that in Christ, the Holy Spirit writes on human hearts, not tablets of stone (2 Cor.3:2 – 3).  God does not keep a scoresheet in His mind to keep track of when we have been naughty.  The scoresheet, if there is one, is within human nature and its condition in each person. 

Irenaeus of Lyons (130 – 202 AD), the first major Christian theologian outside the New Testament to write anything close to a “systematic theology,” who was, according to tradition, taught by Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, which was a short distance from Colossae and Ephesus, where Paul had spent three years (Acts 20:31).  Polycarp had in turn been taught by John, the writer of the Gospel and the Revelation, who had invested much time in Western Asia Minor, according to church tradition.  So Irenaeus’ pedigree is impressive and weighty.  Irenaeus believed the “handwriting against us” referred to the script of sin on our hearts.[34]  When the apostle Paul says that Jesus “nailed it to the cross,” Irenaeus reads the word “it” as meaning the particular corruption of sin embedded in Jesus’ human body.  Notice how well this agrees and aligns with Paul’s use of “fleshly body” in Col.1:22, anticipating “circumcision” of that “flesh” in Col.2:11 – 12 on the level of human nature.  Because we die and rise with Jesus, in union with him, we share in his healed humanity, because he shared in our fallen humanity but overcame its fallenness. 

Contrary to how some evangelicals would like to read “the handwriting which was against us” in 2:14, Jesus certainly did not nail a copy of the Pentateuch on the cross, and it is hard to imagine how we might stretch this language to reach that understanding metaphorically.  Jesus nailed his human body there, and he left for dead the corruption of sin that was in his “fleshly body.”  In his resurrection, he “became perfect” (Heb.5:7 – 9), and thus the source of our salvation from the corruption of sin, because he perfected faith (Heb.12:1 – 2).

The ESV translation, again, is misleading.  In English, Colossians 2:11 – 15 should read like this instead.  One can check biblehub.org to examine my proposal, and I include some extra notes for clarity:

11 And in him you were also circumcised [of the heart] with a circumcision [of the heart] made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ, 12 having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with him through faith in the working of God. 13 And you, who were dead [that is, mortal] in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh [that is, your fallen humanity], God made alive together with him, having sent away from us all our sins, 14 having blotted out the [internal] handwriting [note the singular “handwriting”] of the decrees, which was [note the singular] against us [that is, against our true image-of-God selves]; and he has taken it [note the singular; that is, the sinful handwriting] out of the way, having nailed it to the cross [through his own fleshly and mortal body]. 15 He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him.

As to the application of atonement theory to our emotional life, especially the feeling of guilt, I disagree with Debbie Kespert.  These conclusions are not simply based on different understandings of legal principles (the Equal Protection clause from the Fourteenth Amendment was not and is still not being carried out), or moral questions (possession of stolen property applies here) or biblical questions about whether people in Scripture ever repent for the sins of their people and ancestors and give reparations (they do – see below), or biblical questions about whether the New Testament writers recognize systemic participation in evil (they do), or biblical questions about whether “rulers and authorities” in 2:15 have anything to do with racism and colonial exploitation (they do).  All of that aside for now.

Because Kespert and I do not share the same theology of atonement, we have very different views about how to emotionally handle conversations about racial injustice.  In PSA, people who try to make you feel guilty and then motivate you out of guilt are in the wrong, because they are diminishing the finished work of Christ who absorbed all your punishment and all your reasons for feeling guilty.  This leads to the startling conclusion that anyone who tries to make you feel guilty are theologically wrong.  Recitations of facts cannot cut through this barrier.  Explanations of larger systems cannot, either.  Evangelicals who are adamant about PSA enclose themselves in an emotional barrier.  They will view any other Christians who urge them to perceive racial injustice and support reparations as wrong for making them feel guilty.  PSA therefore serves as a tool of deflection.

In MSA, Jesus can and does work with some of our feelings of guilt.  That is not to say that all of our guilty feelings are correct, or that guilt automatically guides us to the right action.  But as my first post in this series on guilt demonstrates, guilt can be a preliminary experience of genuine love.  It is a stirring.  It is often a feeling that alerts us to our lack of love for other people, or God.  The emotion of guilt should not be reduced to a motivation, nor should it be relied upon as an ongoing motivation for action.  It should not be our only conscious motivation for doing things.  Nevertheless, guilt is a yellow flag, and sometimes a red flag.  It alerts us to turn to Jesus, who will accompany us and fill out what it means to love others in his name.

There is also the emotion of fear, which often accompanies guilt, serves as the looming backdrop on which guilt stands in the foreground, and is worth a brief mention here because of our discussion about Colossians 2.  In PSA, we are supposed to at least initially fear God’s wrath and justice, which is supposedly infinite, retributive, and pain-inflicting for the sake of being pain-inflicting.  In PSA, God has two main attributes, or “faces”:  one face of love; one face of retributive justice.  This contributes to why PSA adherents seem to feel fear when they have to “sit with” the feeling of guilt. 

In MSA, we are supposed to fear something very different.  In MSA, there is no need to be terrified (or afraid, in that sense) of God.  For God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and therefore His very nature is love.  Everything God does must be consistent with that love.  Logically, then, God’s justice must be restorative and His wrath must be targeted at the corruption of sin within us, with our partnership, because God in His love always requires our partnership.  Because this consistently loving God, whose love defines His very nature, created us so that our love defines our very natures, we need only fear what we could become if we love in a disordered, sinful way.  So the proper thing to fear, in some sense, is the internal “handwriting that is against us” (Col.2:14).  That is, we should fear what we could do to our own selves because we may believe the lies of the devil which kill us because swapping truth for lies means experiencing God’s life as a type of death (Lk.12:4 - 5; Jn.10:10).  Those who deny systemic injustice – racial and otherwise – must suppress the truth in their own consciences, construct falsehoods, become addicted to the lies, and often shoot the messengers who point out the truth, metaphorically or literally.  They should be very afraid of what they are doing to themselves.  When Jesus returns and confronts them with the truth, they might prefer their own lies and addictions to Jesus himself, even if they believed in Penal Substitutionary Atonement.

Response #3:  Philip R. Johnson

Now, I examine a rather well-known white evangelical with formidable biblical and theological training, and a wide audience.  Philip R. Johnson is Executive Director of Grace To You, a ministry featuring the teaching of John MacArthur, a well-known pastor in the strongly Calvinist tradition.  Knowing a bit about John MacArthur helps us appreciate Phil Johnson’s response.  MacArthur has been the pastor of Grace Community Church in Southern California since 1969.  He served as chancellor of The Master’s Seminary which features Reformed teaching.  He is an outspoken advocate of many positions and an outspoken critic of specific Christian ministers who hold contrary positions.  Grace To You is an internationally syndicated Christian radio and television program.  It would be fair to say that Phil Johnson therefore represents John MacArthur’s considerable writing, style of thinking, style of confrontation, and many who believe in the Reformed content they are committed to teaching.  On Twitter, Johnson also introduces himself as the founder and curator of The Spurgeon Archive, focusing on British expository preacher and Reformed Baptist Charles Spurgeon. 

Johnson and Anyabwile are collegial acquaintances.  Their generosity with each other, mutual respect, and humor are evident despite their disagreements about race, policing, how to interact with history, etc.  In February 2016, they had an earlier exchange online over similar matters.  Johnson critiqued Anyabwile for adopting “social justice” as a category of ministry and politics, of ignoring certain biblical texts about “justice,” of going to “the left” of the Bible, for blurring the distinction between Black Lives Matter the cause and Black Lives Matter the organization, and a few other things.  Johnson held up statements Anyabwile made in 2008 – 10 that he believes reflected a more faithful Christian position, compared to statements in 2016.[35]  Anyabwile denied that he has changed anything about his teaching over that time period.[36]

On April 5, 2018, one day after Anyabwile posted his article on the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Johnson tweeted a response.  He linked to his 2016 post above as something still relevant, adding his evaluation of Anyabwile’s MLK article:

“Thabiti’s 2nd-to-last paragraph is his most succinct statement of what I find objectionable about that blogpost.”[37]

Johnson referred to Anyabwile’s statement about the 1950s and 60s, and white complicity in a larger system of white supremacy.  Johnson then tweeted again, which led to a brief Twitter exchange with another white man named Ryan Sather:

Johnson’s defense of his grandmother is both personal and socio-political.  I do not mean that disparagingly, or suggest that Johnson was being insincere.  By explaining how impoverished his grandparents were, and how much misfortune befell his grandmother, Johnson raises the question of whether white poverty exonerates his grandmother, and many others like her, from the racism embedded in American society.  Some white Americans faced more economic hardship than some black Americans.  If racism and white supremacy were so total, and so explanatory of people’s lived experience, then why did Johnson’s grandmother suffer what she did?

Johnson rejects the suggestion that his grandmother had “white privilege.”  Then, after being challenged by Ryan Sather, Johnson further clarifies that he rejects the notion that his grandmother was “complicit in the murder” of Dr. King. 

A few short comments are in order.  I would suggest – as probably Thabiti Anyabwile would as well – that “white privilege” can be real even if it does not save all white people, or a particular white person/family, from poverty and other forms of suffering.  “White privilege” does not mean “automatic socio-economic success.”  “White privilege” is the “benefit of the doubt” and empathy that white Americans tend to give each other, especially when compared to the distrust, suspicion of criminality, and sometimes outright fear and hostility that they direct at black Americans.  It also comes from potentially benefiting – for no other reason than whiteness alone – from government programs or from encounters with the police, when one is carrying a gun, for example. Johnson’s grandmother almost certainly had the white privilege of not worrying about her white grandson in ways that a black grandmother would have to worry about her black grandson.

Ryan Sather pointed this out cheekily when he tweeted at Johnson a New York Times article entitled “America’s Federally Financed Ghettos,” published on April 7, 2018.[38]  The article was written by The Editorial Board of the Times, and cited scholarly works like Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, and Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton’s American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass.  Those are must-reads.  “White privilege” is a political benefit and very often an economic benefit which Johnson’s grandmother may or may not have benefited from in a substantial way.  Chances are she did in some form, even if it was small, but that is not the point here.  The validity of “white privilege” does not hang on her particular experience so much as it does on the fact that some large segments of the white American population were unduly favored, not only in the private market but also by public policy, for no other reason than being white.  Some substantial number of white Americans benefited from taxes paid by black Americans, who did not benefit equally from the public investment.  It is noteworthy that Johnson did not reply to Sather.

“You Have to Start with Pardon and Forgiveness”

Anyabwile called white evangelicals to adjust their memory of their parents and grandparents in the hopes that if they understand how “complicity” worked back then, they might be more equipped to understand how “complicity” works today.  Anyabwile mentioned a few historical facts as examples, though in my opinion, he could have connected the dots more clearly.  As I mentioned before, people paid federal taxes, and those taxes funded the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign against Dr. King.  People also paid local and state taxes, and those taxes funded police, who were bringing much grief to black Americans.  Again, people could not stop paying taxes, realistically, but they could speak out against how their tax dollars were used.  And, when white segregationists could openly campaign for President and offer presidential pardons, any amount of mischief could happen.  In American democracy, white citizens bear disproportionate responsibility for that system.  Therefore, Anyabwile called his white evangelical readers to reevaluate their parents and grandparents for the way they gave “assistance” to white supremacy, however actively or passively that “assistance” was given. 

Johnson, however, hears Anyabwile as attacking his grandmother for something she supposedly did.  To Johnson, Anyabwile’s request means that Anyabwile is inventing grounds for grievance.  Even if those grievances had some weight, which Johnson does not concede, Anyabwile is at fault for not forgiving people like Johnson’s grandmother and other white people who were not actively and personally prejudiced against Dr. King. 

This highlights a challenge in communication for both Anyabwile and Johnson.  In the PSA framework, “forgiveness” and “pardon” are held to be preamble and central to the dialogue at all times, which produces tensions for Thabiti Anyabwile, and not just his critical readers.  For if Anyabwile has already forgiven white Americans – including white Christian Americans in particular – then why bring up the racial injustices he perceives in the past and present?  If there are problems in the present, then address them.  But what bearing does the past have if you’ve already forgiven people for past events?

When Johnson replies directly and publicly to Anyabwile, he distances himself from the past.  Here is Johnson at a later date:

“If you want racial reconciliation, you have to start with forgiveness.  Forgiveness is not the pinnacle we [are] appointed to climb.  Forgiveness has to be the foundation we build from.  If you want men and women to reconcile their long grievances with each other, you have to begin with forgiveness, you have to start with pardon.”[39]

Take note.  We see this rhetoric and sentiment again and again from those who are committed to PSA.  They will credit PSA itself for it. 

Because of PSA, people have a difficult time with even the implication that guilt might play a positive role in our ongoing Christian spiritual formation, and a constructive role in relationships, because of the assumption that becomes totalizing:  divine retribution in line with that guilt will be infinitely painful.  Johnson is not as explicit, but he gives evidence that this is where his thought is going when he says that forgiveness and pardon are the non-negotiable starting point.  The question here is:  What are forgiveness and pardon for?  What do they make possible?  Does forgiveness make more repentance and reconciliation possible?  Or is forgiveness itself the reconciliation? 

On matters of race in America, and typically between white and black Christians in dialogue, forgiveness is sometimes considered, especially by white Christians, to be reconciliation itself.[40]  This follows the internal logic of Penal Substitutionary Atonement, and it bears out in Johnson’s reply.    In 2001, sociologists Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith, in their seminal book Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, discuss the individualism and anti-structuralism in white evangelical thinking at great length; they highlight how white evangelicals vastly oversimplify what reconciliation means and what it would entail.  Emerson and Smith did not explore what theological beliefs or frameworks cause that individualism and anti-structuralism.  But I am confident that we can now supply the missing piece:  Penal Substitutionary Atonement.

Notice that Philip Johnson starts by making an equivalence, and the equivalence is emotional.  Black people and white people simply have had “long grievances with each other.”  But where do these grievances come from?  Are black people and white people, broadly speaking, responsible for the same thing?  I would not say so.  Are they equivalent because both communities feel emotions?  No.  This lack of exploration down to root causes suggests that Johnson and other PSA advocates define “reconciliation” as a matter of rearranging thoughts and emotions, as opposed to rearranging power and wealth.  If there are changes that white evangelicals must make in order to absolve themselves of their ongoing guilt, in order to atone for mistakes they have made and keep making with black and Native American people especially, they will not be able to integrate that long emotional journey into the framework of Penal Substitution.  One or the other thing will have to go.

We see in Johnson’s reply the lengths to which people will go if they are devoted to PSA.  Johnson heard in Anyabwile’s paragraph a call to repent “for” his parents’ and grandparents’ own sake. 

“Now, for the sake of argument, let’s acknowledge the truth of this one thing Thabiti said: “The first command of the gospel is ‘repent.’” That’s absolutely true, and that point has been at the heart of many things that I have edited for main author[s] I work with, written on my own, and preached over the past thirty-five years.

“But the gospel calls me to repent for my own sins—not the sins of others. Not even my great grandad’s sins (and he was quite the scoundrel). This emphasis on repentance by proxy is what many of us object to most about Thabiti’s views on what’s required for “social justice” in the new order of “evangelical” conviction. It’s not evangelical at all. It has a flavor reminiscent of Roman Catholicism’s ideas about indulgences and the “treasury of Merit,” or the Mormons’ doctrine of baptism for the dead.

“Besides, my ancestors were not all guilty of racism. I realize that many of today’s stylish social justice warriors are convinced that any white person’s denial of racism is simply proof of guilt. But my view of racism is rather old fashioned. I believe people — individuals — should be judged by the content of their character, and not the color of their skin.”[41]

I note a few things about Johnson’s response because they relate to the issues of atonement, guilt, and emotional development.  These points echo my evaluation of Debbie Kespert, above.  Johnson believes that “racism” is a purely individual and psychological affair, strictly synonymous with having a personal prejudice, in this case, against Dr. King.  He says, “My ancestors were not all guilty of racism,” echoing his defense of his grandmother, from whom he detected no racial prejudice.  Once again, I think we are seeing PSA’s influence at work here on Johnson.  Because PSA requires all persons to confess their guilt, the theology works backwards to reframe all guilt as personal and absolved.

We Inherit from Others, We Share with Others

Johnson does not seem willing to consider that racism might operate in a social system even when people are not personally prejudiced, as in occupying colonized land and claiming all of its resources in principle, benefiting from a racially segregated housing system designed and financed by government policies, benefiting from the unequal schooling system that results when public schools are financed by local property taxes, being prevented from accessing the ballot box, and even the U.S. two-party system and its manner of “winner take all” vote-counting, which is not the only way voting choices could work (see “ranked choice voting”).  If there are systemic forces at work, then we would also expect Jesus to show us how to disentangle oneself from the system sufficiently so as to not acquire continual personal guilt from it. 

Relatedly, do we need to repent of our ancestors’ sins?  Keep Johnson’s objection in mind and consider:  How does Jesus connect past sins and present sins here? 

29 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, 30 and say, ‘If we had been living in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ 31 So you testify against yourselves, that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. 32 Fill up, then, the measure of the guilt of your fathers. 33 You serpents, you brood of vipers, how will you escape the sentence of hell? (Matthew 23:29 - 33)

Jesus warned the Jewish leadership of his day that Jewish leaders of the past -- who Jesus pointedly called “your fathers” -- had killed the prophets.  The Jewish leaders were misremembering that history to flatter their egos.  Because they erected monuments to the prophets, they portray their ancestors as those who received the prophets and rejoiced in their message.  It was a glossy work over of the past, and contributes to self-deception in the present. 

Jesus’ statement is strikingly similar to how many white Americans regard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  White Americans approved making a federal holiday for him on the third Monday of every January.  That is like erecting a monument, portraying ourselves as people who honor his message.  However, we as a nation clearly do not honor his message. 

Debbie Kespert and Philip Johnson do this very thing when they appropriate King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.  In one of the now common moves of many white Americans against black Americans, they turn King into a spokesperson for policy colorblindness, despite the question of reparations and the fact of ongoing racial injustices.  Both Kespert and Johnson turn MLK’s “dream for children” against Anyabwile.  But really they turn it against MLK himself, since the Civil Rights leader did in fact say that the U.S. needs to give reparations for black Americans, and perhaps even poor whites in the labor movement.[42]  MLK noted very pointedly that the U.S. government should give resources and opportunities to black Americans because it gave many white Americans virtually free land through the Homestead Acts, virtually free education through the land-grant colleges, very favorable loans to white farmers through the USDA and to white suburbanites through the FHA and GI Bill, and very favorable contracts and funding through the Department of Defense.[43]  Kespert and Johnson also throw MLK’s quote back against black Americans who either assert that racism continues or that special measures need to be taken for reparations. 

I find it important to point out that Kespert and Johnson quote from King selectively and in a highly misleading way, because PSA trains its advocates to treat biblical data in selective and misleading ways as well.  My examination of Colossians, above, demonstrates that PSA advocates do not understand the significance of “circumcision of the heart.”  That is not trivial, because it represents how PSA trivializes the Jewish context of key themes.  PSA fails to understand the medical and surgical and restorative framework of Jewish understandings of atonement, and instead places the Hebrew lawcourt and biblical language – especially the meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus – into an entirely different framework.  PSA therefore imports a framework into its selective reading of Scripture that develops meanings and interpretations alien to Scripture itself.  PSA advocates regularly misinterpret the Jewish sacrificial system, Isaiah 53, Jesus’ quotation of Psalm 22, the biblical theme of divine fire, the Nicene Creed, the theological thought of the early Christians, and an assortment of other biblical and patristic passages.  Kespert’s and Johnson’s willingness to deploy King’s “I Have a Dream” speech against King himself should raise serious questions on its own.  But their use of Scripture fits the pattern.  It would seem that PSA advocates are trained by PSA itself to treat biblical, historical, legal, and social scientific data in selective and misleading ways.

Jesus insisted on accurate historical remembering.  He insisted that the Jewish leaders repent of the sins of their ancestors.  What did repentance entail?  Not repeating their mistakes.  Anyabwile likewise insists that white evangelicals repent of the sins of their ancestors.  How?  By not repeating their mistakes.  Should we repent of our ancestors’ sins?  Certainly so, if we are still doing them!  In the democratic United States, a bare minimum for a white person is to speak truthfully, for example, saying that MLK was assassinated, as Anyabwile says. 

Yet somehow, Phil Johnson “hears” Anyabwile saying that we should repent for the sins of our ancestors, on their behalf.  And Johnson worries about this.  So do others, he says, again attesting to a broad network of other PSA advocates who think and feel the same way Johnson does.  If we can repent for the sins of our ancestors, then we can do something in the spiritual realm that takes away from their personal responsibility and guilt.  So he brings up his theological worries about Roman Catholic indulgences and the Mormon practice of baptism for the dead, practices which suggest that your repentance can vicariously substitute in for people who have gone to the grave without repenting.  In other words, he launches himself straight down a rabbit hole.  That is a fundamental confusion, a non-sequitur, and a distraction from the main point at hand.

Why does Johnson raise this theological specter?  Given the depth of Johnson’s engagement with Anyabwile’s article and other writings over their years of friendship, it is mystifying.  Johnson, after all, is a smart man who admits to liking wit and snark, in others’ writings and his own.[44]  Did Anyabwile mean that every white American alive today was personally guilty of assassinating Dr. King, and needs to repent of it?  Even if they weren’t alive then?  No.  Anyabwile specifically denies meaning that, when he wrote, “I don’t need all white people to feel guilty about the 1950s and 60s—especially those who weren’t even alive.”  Anyabwile’s stated purpose was to help modern white evangelicals understand how “complicity” works so they could apply that insight to the present context.

Something clouds Johnson’s mind.  I suspect that there is more here than what people think about basic constitutional law and political psychology, systems, or biblical corporate repentance.  We must take seriously the fact that Johnson himself tells us why he has such difficulty with racial injustice, reconciliation on the terms Anyabwile calls for, and reparations:  Penal Substitutionary Atonement.  His own emotional development has been shaped so much by PSA that his intellectual defenses about issues of racism, in which he is really protecting PSA itself, make no sense.  Anyabwile did not say that white evangelicals repent “for” the sins of their parents and grandparents, on their behalf.  He said that they should repent “of” the sins of their parents and grandparents, to help this generation stop doing what past generations did.  Yet because of PSA, any language that comes close to suggesting that we can bear away our own guilt, and can bear the guilt and debts of others, raises alarm bells.  Thus, Johnson overreacts. 

Which is very unfortunate for Johnson, because in Scripture, there can be no doubt that God calls people to repair the harm and sins that others have done, including intergenerationally.  To that subject we turn.

Intergenerational, Collective, and Systemic Responsibilities in Scripture

God has a goal of repairing relationship, of moving people back to the garden, of honoring His creation vision.  And since in the biblical story, God Himself steps in for other people, substituting His activity in for theirs, God calls people to step in for others, too.  These themes are so deeply embedded in the long biblical history between God and His people, that it is amazing that anyone would miss them.  Yet these themes are exactly what PSA advocates attempt to explain away.

Consider the expectation that I pay others’ debts, in both Moses’ and Jesus’ teaching.  If I had been an Israelite living under the Jubilee Year law of Leviticus 25, in certain cases, God would have held me responsible to pay for the debt of a family member (Lev.25:48 – 49) – even if that family member was in debt because she or he had been irresponsible!  Doing so would make me “like God,” because God parallels indebtedness to being under the reign of Pharaoh.  And just as God liberated His people from Pharaoh to get them to the garden land, God liberates His people from indebtedness to get them to their portion of the garden land (Lev.25:54 – 55).  And if I can play a part in that, then God calls me to do so.  This principle of substituting one person’s active, not passive, obedience for another lays the groundwork for the “kinsman-redeemer” role on which the book of Ruth turns.  It is also the principle on which Medical Substitutionary Atonement turns, as Jesus substituted his active obedience for ours as his perfect faithfulness healed his human nature, in which we now share by his Spirit.[45]  God’s requirement that I pay the debts of another flies in the face of the white evangelical tendency to say that each person’s debts, even guilt, is their own problem.

Michael Rhodes writes a very thoughtful article called “Should We Repent of Our Grandparents’ Racism? Scripture on Intergenerational Sin.”  When he examines the Jubilee law of Leviticus 25, he reminds us that one Israelite family could have acquired the land of another unjustly (Lev.25:14, 17), and enough time between one Jubilee year and the next could have gone by that the next generation of those family members are now facing each other.  Do the adult children of one family owe reparations to the children of the other?  Rhodes says:

“In that circumstance, then, the Jubilee would require the children to confess and make restitution for the sins of their fathers by restoring the land their fathers had stolen to the descendants of the ones from whom it was stolen.

“In other words, sometimes the Bible suggests we have to repent of the guilt of our ancestors because we have inherited the obligation to fix their mistakes. That they’re dead does not change the fact that the debt remains outstanding. The Year of Jubilee teaches us that to continually refuse to repair our ancestors’ sins is to make them our own. 

“Leviticus then demands that we confess our own sins and the sins of our fathers [and mothers]. In our context, I suggest this means that I must confess my own white supremacy and the white supremacy of my ancestors. Why? Because the economic injustices perpetrated by the white community against the black community still benefit white households and still harm black households.”[46]

Lest we think that the movement from Moses to Jesus annuls this responsibility, we need to recognize that Jesus pointedly removed the supposition of the near-family relation in his parable of the Good Samaritan, and replaced it with its antithesis:  a strained, hostile relation.  The Samaritan paid the innkeeper to care for the needs of the near-dead Jewish man, paying his debt (Lk.10:35). 

The group identities of these two men, and the hostility between them, are a foundational part of Jesus’ point, and an important point when discussing race relations in the U.S.  Samaritans were the result of intermarriages and most certainly rape cases between the Assyrian conquerors of 721 BC and those Israelites from the Northern Kingdom of Israel who did not flee to the Southern Kingdom of Judah.  By the time of Jesus, Samaritans and Jews were filled with mutual suspicion and animosity.  Jesus’ own disciples James and John wanted to call down fire from heaven on a Samaritan village for not receiving Jesus (Lk.9:54), which drew Jesus’ pointed rebuke (Lk.9:55 – 56); Jesus probably told the parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk.10:25 – 37) as an extended lesson for his own disciples about Samaritans.  Another example is found in the use of the label “Samaritan” as a slur.  The Jewish leaders in Jerusalem hurled a two-pronged accusation at Jesus:  “You are a Samaritan and have a demon” (Jn.8:48).  From the Jewish side, mere mention of “Samaritan” as an ethnic label was derogatory.  Jesus denied having a demon (Jn.8:49) but never said anything about being called a “Samaritan.”[47]  Jesus did not find it in poor taste to be identified with Samaritans; quite the opposite:  as a Jewish man, Jesus was trying to overcome that barrier on the Samaritan side (e.g. Jn.4:1 – 42). 

Therefore, when Jesus selected a Samaritan as the hero of his parable, he was challenging his Jewish audience to expand their definitions of “neighbor” and of “loving one’s neighbor.”  From God’s perspective, a Samaritan could be a better neighbor than Jewish leaders rushing off to perform their ceremonial duties.  And loving one’s neighbor certainly meant sharing in the neighbor’s recovery of full health, even if you despise them and believe that you had nothing to do with their injury.  In short, even if white evangelicals believed – falsely – they had nothing to do with the suffering of black and other Americans, they still have the responsibility to share in their recovery to full health.

Michael Rhodes also gives examples of various patterns in Scripture that are relevant to our discussion about Anyabwile’s article:

• Examples of intergenerational confession in Scripture, where the present generation confesses their own sins and those of their ancestors (Neh.1:5; 9:2; Dan.9:4 – 6, 16), because God commanded them to do so (Lev.26:40). 

• Examples in Scripture and modern life where people are influenced by the sins of their families or environments, and they need to repent of it, with that understanding (Jer.16:10 – 13; Rom.12:2). 

• Examples of how one generation inherits the obligation to repair the damage their forefathers and foremothers did (Lev.26:40 – 44), which continue in Jesus’ teaching where there is no blood relation, or even causal relation to the suffering (Lk.10:25 – 37; 16:19 – 35).

Rhodes’ entire article is worth reading.  To his observations, I would add the following:  First, God called His people into a “divine counsel” of sorts, to pray on behalf of others who had sinned, and then intervene on their behalf out of a sense of relationship or communal identity:  Job interceded for his family and friends (Job.1:5; 42:8, 10); Abraham interceded for Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen.18); Moses interceded for Israel (Ex.32 – 34); in the narrative of Samuel, multiple people intervened and mediated for others; various kings interceded on behalf of the whole nation, especially in the narrative of Chronicles; the Psalms cultivate a sense of responsibility to lead others to worship and faithfulness.  These patterns of prayer are important spiritual formation.  God uses them to shape and form the person/people praying into action.  

Second, the Lord’s prayer shows the same power to spiritually form and shape Christians into action.[48]  Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Forgive us our debts” (Mt.6:12), using the Greek word “aphes” which means “remit, send away, dismiss,” and the plural pronoun “us.”  For Jesus to train his disciples to pray for the entire community of disciples – the church global – is a lesson in corporate identification and corporate responsibility.  How does Jesus intend that prayer to shape our hearts and perspectives?  Would white evangelicals be able to pray, “Send away our debts” while doing nothing about poor and minority communities sinking further and further into student loan debt, medical debt, credit card debt, prisoners’ debt (functionally) from probationary and other court-imposed fees, and the mortgage debt from the predatory lending practices that led to the housing crisis of 2008 – 09?  It would be hard to pray one thing and do nothing about it.  Unsurprisingly, most white evangelicals do not translate Jesus’ prayer that way, or understand Jesus to be remotely suggesting that people who are financially superior to others are in danger of feeling morally superior to them, and need to repent of it by relieving others’ debts.  Philosopher David Bentley Hart, who is Eastern Orthodox, argues that this is exactly the way we should understand the prayer, as encompassing both financial debts and spiritual debts.[49]  Hart’s argument is well substantiated from patristic and medieval understandings of the Lord’s Prayer,[50] as well as the Christian practice, attested for centuries, of ransoming people out of slavery, which is one extremis of indebtedness.[51]

Third, the New Testament is very sensitive to systemic theft, such as theft committed by empire, which is a particular power relation of exploitation.  The New Testament sensitivity is perhaps most evident in Luke 3:10 – 14.  In this passage, John the Baptist said to the crowd that preparing for the kingdom of God involves sharing one’s wealth (Luke 3:10 – 14).  But John had further commands for those who made their money based on the exploitative power of the empire.  For example, he told tax-collectors, who made their salaries by charging over and above what Rome required, to make nothing (Luke 3:12 – 13).  Then he told soldiers, who regularly extorted the terrorized populace because their commanding officer commands it, to disobey any order to extort anyone, or falsely accuse anyone of criminality, and to be content with their wages (Luke 3:14).  We must understand that the kingdom of God contextualizes the anti-theft commandment to the structures of power it confronts.  The people whose livelihoods are created by this exploitative power relationship are called to personally absorb the cost of a good portion of the injustice in their own paychecks.  We must also recognize that John the Baptist’s teaching run roughshod against the typical white evangelical order of ministry.  The Baptist called people to these things before they were Christians, before the Spirit was given, and even before Jesus had started his public ministry.  In other words, discipleship does not just follow after evangelism and conversion; it also comes before. 

Luke 3:10 – 14 is one passage that PSA cannot assimilate to itself.  One attempt, however, is the most extreme defensive maneuver taken by white evangelicals:  dispensationalism, a forced and hyper-Lutheran way of reading “law versus gospel” into an emotional framework of “the anxiety caused by any and all of God’s commandments versus the assurance of God’s forgiveness.”  In dispensationalism, all ethical commands prior to Jesus’ death and resurrection are treated as commands that drive people to seek God’s forgiveness at the cross.  Hence, in dispensationalism, Luke 3:10 – 14 belongs to the dispensation of Mosaic Israel, a dispensation that Jesus paused or left behind as he started the dispensation of the Church.  This way of reading Luke 3:10 – 14 means that while John the Baptist taught this as an inseparable part of the kingdom of God message, Jesus did not.  This is alarming, and it shows the linkages between theological ideas.  PSA is the base platform, and dispensationalism sits on top of it.  In fact, there is a certain emotional trajectory within PSA which makes dispensationalism appealing, which might explain its massive spread in the U.S.  While PSA can certainly exist without dispensationalism, dispensationalism cannot exist without PSA.  And in light of the moral challenges we face, anyone who is not a dispensationalist should be troubled that PSA does nothing in itself to shut the door to dispensationalism.

To sum up, Scripture strongly and persistently calls for us to take up intergenerational, systemic, and collective responsibilities to repair harm done. 

Therefore, Philip Johnson makes a double mistake.  On the one hand, he misreads Anyabwile, and on the other hand, he misreads Scripture.  Johnson exaggerates Anyabwile’s meaning and defends against things Anyabwile was technically not saying.  However, I do think Anyabwile was trying to guide his white evangelical brethren into an experience of clarity and guilt which PSA does not permit or account.  But Anyabwile could not state clearly what he meant, because of his own commitment to PSA.  So his own rhetoric was suggestive and vague.  But perhaps for Johnson, it would have only opened a can of worms.  For, more seriously, Johnson misreads Scripture itself.  He misses the deeply embedded patterns in Scripture where God calls the individual to take responsibility for the community across time and space. 

How is it possible for an intellectual like Johnson to make such significant mistakes?  The only explanation is that Penal Substitutionary Atonement influences his thinking, clouds his judgment, and makes him ill-equipped to handle the emotion of guilt and the reality of ongoing guilt that continues to build the longer he denies it.  He became defensive and confused whenever he was confronted with forms of guilt and feelings of guilt that PSA does not equip him to handle.  To deny a current source of objective guilt like possession of stolen property, which requires that he pay something back in reparations in order to atone for present sin and be reconciled with others, Johnson must deny that racism exists in the systemic, communal ways that Anyabwile suggests, and reduce racism down to personal motivations.  In order to attack Anyabwile as the messenger – a messenger who argues that Johnson must acknowledge the possibility of ongoing guilt of societal racism enough to love better – Johnson misrepresents him.  Then, in order to repose on PSA, Johnson must also misrepresent Scripture itself, which he believes should simply confirm the theory of atonement which takes his guilt away. 

Guilt and the Group

In general, we get defensive when other people present us with evidence of our guilt.  Defensiveness is one thing, and it is understandable that fallen human beings would deny responsibility, change the subject, point the finger somewhere else, and/or go on the attack.  Adam did it in the garden, blaming Eve and God for his own disobedience:  “The woman whom You gave to be with me…” (Gen.3:12).  But there is something more happening.  Penal Substitutionary Atonement contributes to this problem. 

In June 2020, Eastern Orthodox American priest Stephen Freeman, formerly a Southern Baptist, explains why it is not only possible, but necessary, to repent on behalf of your community.[52]  In a recent article entitled “The Sins of a Nation,” Father Freeman draws from Scripture, science, social science, and lived experience.  When you repent on your own behalf, you are committing yourself to personal change.  When you repent on behalf of your community, you are also committing to calling your community to change as well.  So the implications and levels of responsibility are different.  But there is indeed a category for repentance on behalf of one’s community.  Father Freeman’s article is very worth reading. 

Central to Freeman’s point is the contrast between Eastern Orthodox and Western Protestant ways of treating sin.  In Eastern Orthodoxy, sin is our fallen condition and a contagion and a power before it is something for which anyone incurs personal guilt.  In Western Protestantism, sin is understood in terms of personal guilt.  Western Protestants are especially unable to understand how to pastorally handle our participation in groups and communities, like nations, but different understandings of the atonement Jesus wrought as a solution to our sin. 

Part of the challenge is surely related to one’s self-perception and group-perception.  We have no trouble saying, “We won” when our favorite sports team wins.  Or when our athletes win in the Olympic Games.  Or when our country wins a war or another international conflict.  We have no problem taking some measured and appropriate pride and joy in seeing our country flourish, or when our leaders do the right thing.  Even when we have done the bare minimum – like pay our taxes – or simply offer thoughts and prayers, we hold ourselves “complicit” in the success of the group.  We may even give ourselves a little credit for giving the players a little more motivation by our cheering, or booing our opponents into distraction.  We may even entertain childhood fantasies that when we caused some small “butterfly effect” in the universe that helped “our team” win. 

Why, then, is it so hard to hold ourselves “complicit” in the failures and shortcomings of the group?  In the United States, this is in fact a moral minimum.  For the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution begins with the phrase, “We the People.”  While it is true that “We the People” did not always mean “everyone,” functionally today, each one of us must take responsibility for the actions of our leaders because we elected them.  “We the People” must take responsibility for the laws, policies, and practices of our nation because “We the People” are ultimately responsible.  In the past, we may not all have been responsible in quite the same way and to the same degree.  And to be sure, in the present, we may not all be responsible in quite the same way and to the same degree.  But in principle, “We the People” share in both the moral high points and low points of this country.  That includes complicity in both its successes and failures.  And that includes its racist white supremacy.  That legal and historical context shapes how we must offset the things we cannot change by ourselves by expressing our disagreement, registering a moral protest, and campaigning for change. 

Change is clearly needed.  Since April 2018 when Anyabwile and his critics exchanged arguments, more events have revealed the depth of white evangelical confusion about the common good.  I already mentioned above that one month before Anyabwile wrote, the New York Times spotlighted Trump’s decision to abandon the Fair Housing Act and thus reinvigorate “decades of racial, ethnic and income segregation.”[53]  In 2020, Trump campaigned for a second term on the proposal that he not enforce the Fair Housing Act, which was widely understood to be an appeal to suburban white people.  These are constitutional requirements of the executive branch.[54]  Yet Trump, GOP leadership, and the Republican base maintain that they are the party of “law and order.”  Maintaining white supremacy in housing is quite in keeping with a white American family which made much of its fortune in real estate. 

Moreover, just as James Earl Ray hoped that George Wallace would win the presidency and pardon him, Trump gave presidential pardons to people who either platformed white supremacy – like Steve Bannon[55] – or committed actions that are white supremacist – like the four white American Blackwater mercenaries who cruelly gunned down Iraqi civilians for sport in 2007.[56]  This list goes on.  Repentance means having an accurate view of ourselves in the present, and taking appropriate actions, such as not electing the likes of George Wallace or Donald Trump.  Yet 84 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2020, up from 81 percent in 2016.  And a substantial amount of white evangelicals supported, and still support, Trump’s lies about election fraud in the 2020 election, even after the Insurrection of January 6, 2021.

Here is a final, brief example of a PSA advocate who opposed Anyabwile.

Response #4:  Ed Dingess

Ed Dingess engaged with Anyabwile on Twitter.  Who is Ed Dingess?  On a website called Reformed Reasons where he publishes an impressive amount of adult Christian education content which he has produced, Dingess introduces himself as: 

“Married with four children and five grandchildren. I have pastored several churches in three states. I hold a ThD in Systematic Theology and have focused a great deal of my attention and studies in the area Presuppositional Apologetics.”[57]

After tweets back and forth involving multiple people, and after more articles and posts, Ed Dingess wrote an article in Reformation Charlotte titled, “Thabiti Anyabwile, The Heretic.” 

“Like everything else, the issue is how Anyabwile defines these terms and how is he using them. When you define justice using such concepts as slavery reparations or how one votes while asserting that these are sin issues and indeed gospel issues, you have just added items to the gospel that Scripture does not.

According to Anyabwile, true faith doesn’t vote for GOP candidates, it contends for reparations. True faith hires pastors based on melanin and diversity standards rather than biblical qualifications. True faith contends for open borders and manipulates the civil magistrate and so on and so forth. By making these matters issues of true faith, Anyabwile makes them issues of the gospel, and by doing so he has also created a sect or faction of sorts. And this sect holds that these issues are gospel issues.”

“Anyabwile’s notion of repentance on behalf of the dead mirrors that of Roman Catholicism’s indulgences for the dead yet takes it even a step further — that the guilt of the dead actually lay upon the shoulders of the living. Yet, not only do the Scriptures teach individual responsibility for sin (Ezekiel 18:29), the idea that one can repent on behalf of another is most certainly another gospel.”

“When we make demands on people and attach those demands to genuine faith, divine grace, and forgiveness in Christ, we corrupt and pervert the gospel. When we talk about past guilt to those who have genuine faith in Christ, we speak about something that does not actually exist if in fact the gospel is true. When you place guilt upon the forgiven, you arrogantly claim to undo what Christ has done. And to claim that the work of Christ can be undone is to reject the true essence of the gospel.”[58]

Since Dingess repeats things that Pulpit and Pen, Kespert, and Johnson said, I will only consider the new arguments he brings.

Dingess names the issue of justice.  Like all PSA advocates, believes that true justice – indeed, divine justice – is meritocratic-retributive and not restorative.  This is a common mistake, which is highly contested terrain now in academic evangelical circles because evangelicals are becoming aware that their biblical arguments are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Hebrew court process, and of words like “righteousness,” “justice,” and “justification.”[59]  Yet because PSA rests on the mistaken belief that divine justice is fundamentally retributive, PSA advocates defend that view.

Dingess also makes the issue of racial justice and reparations into a partisan one.  No doubt he believes that Anyabwile is the one who has already done so.  And perhaps there are articles or correspondences from Anyabwile about which I am not aware.  But from what I have read, Anyabwile did a decent job at making the issue political in the truest sense – a matter of public policy – but not partisan per se.  In ideological terms, one should be able to be a Republican, believe in limited government and personal accountability, and be for reparations.

Dingess tries to use Ezekiel 18 as a shield against what he thinks Anyabwile is saying about the parents and grandparents of today’s white evangelicals.  He is mistaken about both.  I have already explained this recurrent misunderstanding of Anyabwile.  Here I will explain why Digness is mistaken about Ezekiel 18 and misuses it.  Debbie Kespert, in a previous blog post, also appealed to Ezekiel 18 in the same way.  This highlights a common tendency that PSA advocates, and perhaps white evangelicals more broadly, make of this passage.

As I explored above, undoing damage, like liberating a relative from debt in the Jubilee Year, is not a punishment.  It was considered an honor, for it made a person “like God” and helps us grow in the likeness of God.  On the basis of patriotism, I feel and believe strongly that I am indebted to pay for veterans’ care through my taxes, even though I also feel and believe strongly that Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the “War on Terror” were morally wrong.  We can inherit debts without those debts being personal punishments.  While in Ezekiel 18, God says that He will not make children bear the punishment for their ancestors’ sin, God can still hold us responsible for undoing the damage of our ancestors’ sins, especially if it was committed in the name of Jesus, like in the Christian nationalism of the Puritans which claimed the land of Native Americans, or the Christian slaveholding plantations of the U.S. South which claimed the lives of enslaved people of African heritage, or the building of church buildings with slave labor, and many other things.  Dingess apparently wants to be released from certain relational obligations, and perceives them as punishment.  But he is incorrect.  This mistake is made possible because PSA advocates believe that the language of court-imposed penalty (“Jesus paid our penalty”) is equivalent to the language of debt-payment (“Jesus paid our debt”).  Thus, Dingess is incorrect when he conflates responsibility to undo harm with the punishment Ezekiel had in mind.  Dingess’ conceptual move suggests that Enlightenment individualism has influenced him far too much, because Penal Substitutionary Atonement fits comfortably into a framework where one can imagine that we have no relational obligations. 

Moreover, Ezekiel 18 only had direct relevance to the Israelites under the Sinai covenant, where God’s punishment on the Israelites took a specific form:  exile.  In the Sinai covenant, if the Israelites worshiped other gods or abased themselves before other kings, then God would give them what they wanted.  God’s consequences on Israel were therefore revelatory, not strictly retributive.  God revealed externally what Israel was choosing internally.  “Exile” was the umbrella term for that.  In exile, Israel’s vulnerability to the wild world of the Gentiles mirrored Adam and Eve’s vulnerability to the wild creation.  And that exile could last for “three to four generations” (Ex.20:5).  In that sense, the second, third, and fourth generations from the initial rebellious parental generation would suffer an exile which they technically did not deserve.  God’s consequences were also restorative, not retributive, because God’s goal was that the parents who had harmed their children’s faith would participate in the undoing of that damage, a pattern that began in the book of Numbers when the first generation of Israelites failed to have faith, thus damaged the faith of the second generation, and had to help undo that damage.  Ezekiel had the insight into, and hope for, the new covenant, which meant this dynamic would no longer be relevant.  In the new covenant, each person would be responsible for receiving the “new heart and new spirit” (Ezk.11:18; 36:26 – 36) that God provides. 

Once again, highlighting the difference of how the two atonement theories interact with Scripture is important.  What does Medical Substitutionary Atonement make of Ezekiel 18?  MSA asserts that we receive the “new heart and new spirit” Jesus perfected in himself, and that this is perfectly compatible with the notion that we bear the responsibilities inherited from our family, tribe, or nation.  For inheriting responsibilities is not at all the same as inheriting punishment.  And of course the inheritor of ill-gotten gains must give back those gains in order to participate in atonement.  As I explained in the last post, Jesus comes into us by his Spirit to retell our stories.  When he does so, he calls for our partnership to undo the sin and harm that we did.  Jesus’ retelling of our stories in a better key reflects our participation of Jesus’ retelling of Israel’s story, and Adam and Eve’s story, in his earthly life.

Penal Substitutionary Atonement creates difficulties, exemplified by Ezekiel 18, even if the racial injustices are just one generation old.  How do you call a non-Christian white supremacist son of plantation owners, or plantation bankers, to repent and believe in Jesus?  Is there anything that person needs to do in addition to cognitively believing in Jesus and praying “the sinner’s prayer”?  The problem with PSA is not whether personal guilt can be present from one generation to the next.  One generation’s sin of theft creates the next generation’s sin of possession of stolen property.  The sins are related, but not identical.  The problem is the emotional relevance, and permissibility in Christian ministry of ongoing objective guilt, subjective guilty feelings, and whether we should act on guilt.  In PSA, the preacher says, “Christ paid for all your sins and took all your guilt; there is nothing you can do to affect your standing before God because Christ’s work alone is finished.”  Is there something that the inheritor of ill-gotten gains must do in order to participate in atonement?  The PSA advocate becomes conflicted at this very point.

Conclusion:  The Narrow and Shallow Motivations of Penal Substitution Advocates

PSA advocates regularly reframe obligations to repair harm as opportunities to show mercy.  The depth of motivations and emotions stays narrow and shallow.  PSA is almost certainly the less examined reason why Atlanta megachurch pastor Louie Giglio, later in June 2020, called the enslavement of African Americans a “white blessing”: 

“We understand the curse that was slavery, white people do, and we say that was bad.  But we miss the blessing of slavery that it actually built up the framework for the world that white people live in.”[60]

The cultural moment behind his statement is important:  Giglio, Chik-Fil-A CEO Dan Cathy, and rapper Lecrae were discussing police brutality, a startling realization for many white Americans that year.  Giglio meant “white privilege” but, because white people don’t like the phrase, looked for a different term.  So he stumbled into the other phrase, “white blessing.” 

My point is not whether we are all capable of misspeaking; we are.  My point is that Giglio’s commitment to Penal Substitutionary Atonement is almost certainly what drew his rhetoric towards the narrow and shallow.  Giglio was looking for a way to call white evangelicals to have more compassion and understanding.  But because of his belief in PSA, he stepped into the well-worn track of turning an obligation to repair harm into something else.  Because of PSA, obligations cannot be described straightforwardly as obligations.  PSA practitioners feel a need to reframe them as “blessings.” 

PSA results in its adherents hollowing out normal human motivations – motivations which also have biblical warrant.  PSA probably is also behind certain white evangelicals warning against empathy, including for victims of abuse and injustice.[61]

Or, as the Reformation Charlotte would say bluntly in October 2019, “the Christian response to the push for reparations should simply be that whites owe nothing.”[62]

Consider reading or rereading the previous blog post, Atonement Theories & Guilt, Part 1: Guilt Is an Early Stage of Love.

[1] The Gospel Coalition Council, “Preamble,” The Gospel Coalition; https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/about/foundation-documents/#preamble.

[2] The Gospel Coalition Council, “Confessional Statement,” The Gospel Coalition; https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/about/foundation-documents/#confessional-statement. Tim Keller and D.A. Carson wrote booklets exploring the 14 points of the Confessional Statement.

[3] Thabite Anyabwile, “We Await Repentance for Assassinating Dr. King,” The Gospel Coalition, April 4, 2018; https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/thabiti-anyabwile/await-repentance-assassinating-dr-king/

[4] “Echoes of Freedom: South Asian Pioneers in California, 1899-1965 | 10. US vs. Bhagat Singh Thind,” University of California Berkeley Library; https://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/echoes-of-freedom/bhagat-singh-thind notes, “Because of the Thind decision, many Indian who were already naturalized had their citizenship rescinded. The Thind decision also meant that the Alien Land Law applied to the many Indian immigrants who had already purchased or leased land. After this ruling some landowners lost their property, but many continued to hold property they had previously acquired and to buy or lease new property in the names of American lawyers, bankers, or farmers whom they trusted. A few were able to hold land in the names of their American-born children, though this strategy did not become widespread till after a 1933 court case challenging the practice of "Hindu" farmers holding land through American front men. The actual loss of land at that time of the Thind decision is not easy to estimate since official records, of necessity, hid rather than revealed the true owners.”

[5] Hampton Sides, Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Hunt for His Assassin (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2010)

[6] Gene Slater, Freedom to Discriminate: How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America (Berkeley, CA: Heydey, 2021); Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017).

[7] Uriel B. Jimenez, “Fresno’s Long Hot Summer of 1967: An Examination of Housing and Employment Discrimination,” Master’s thesis, California State University, Fresno, 2017; https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/concern/theses/2r36tz57s, p.46.  Cited in Slater, p.6.

[8] After Brown was decided, U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. (D-VA) started the Byrd Organization to promote a strategy of massive resistance in Virginia. These efforts resulted in the Stanley plan adopted by the Virginia General Assembly in 1956. Virginia’s voters approved an amendment to their state constitution allowing parents to opt out of desegregated schools and to send their children to a private “Christian” school of their choice, and benefit from tax-exemption status.

Sociologist Jennifer Eaton Dyer, “Core Beliefs of Southern Evangelicals: A Psycho-Social Investigation of the Evangelical Megachurch Phenomenon” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2007) p.23, writes, “These schools included Brentwood Academy (1969), Father Ryan (1970), Franklin Road Academy (1971), or Ezell-Harding (1979), to name a few. These were the “White flight” schools where parents could send their children under the guise, conscious or unconscious, of proclaimed ‘Christian’ values, a safer environment, and more sound education.”

See also “It’s Not over in the South: School Desegregation in Forty-Three Southern Cities Eighteen Years after Brown.” U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Education, May 1972.

[9] Davison Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle Over Northern School Segregation, 1865 – 1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

[10] Eve L. Ewing, “King Wanted More Than Just Desegregation,” The Atlantic, February 2018; https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/still-separate-and-unequal/552515/

[11] Martin Luther King, Jr., Statement by Dr. King re: School Desegregation 10 Years After, 1964; reprinted by The Atlantic, February 2018; https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/mlk-school-desegregation-report-card/552524/.

[12] Martin Luther King, Jr., The Three Evils: Address to the Hungry Club Forum in Atlanta, GA, May 10, 1967; reprinted by The Atlantic, February 2018; https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/martin-luther-king-hungry-club-forum/552533/.  King said, “In 1954 the Supreme Court rendered a decision outlawing segregation in the public schools. And even to this day in the deep South, less than five per cent of the Negro students are attending integrated schools. We haven’t even made one per cent progress a year. If it continues at this rate, it will take another ninety seven years to integrate the schools of the South and of our nation …”

[13] For a straightforward, 10 – 15 minute read, see the blog posts by Sangwon Yang and Mako Nagasawa, The Illusion of Meritocracy in Housing: Part 1 and Part 2, found here: www.anastasiscenterblog.org/a-long-repentance-1.

[14] Amy Traub, Catherine Ruetschlin, Laura Sullivan, Tatjana Meschede, Lars Dietrich, and Thomas Shapiro, “The Racial Wealth Gap: Why Policy Matters,” Demos and the Institute for Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University, June 21, 2016; http://www.demos.org/publication/racial-wealth-gap-why-policy-matters.

[15] Nikole Hannah-Jones, “The Missionary,” This American Life, November 22, 2013; https://www.thisamericanlife.org/512/house-rules recounts the history of George Romney, then Secretary of HUD, and President Nixon, who undermined Romney and HUD because integrating housing was so politically unpopular.

[16] Thabite Anyabwile, “We Await Repentance for Assassinating Dr. King,” The Gospel Coalition, April 4, 2018; https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/thabiti-anyabwile/await-repentance-assassinating-dr-king/.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Jonathan Mahler and Steve Eder, “‘No Vacancies’ for Blacks: How Donald Trump Got His Start, and Was First Accused of Bias,” New York Times, August 28, 2016; https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/us/politics/donald-trump-housing-race.html, write that despite narrowly avoiding a DOJ suit, “an investigation by The New York Times — drawing on decades-old files from the New York City Commission on Human Rights, internal Justice Department records, court documents and interviews with tenants, civil rights activists and prosecutors — uncovered a long history of racial bias at his family’s properties, in New York and beyond.”

[20] Dareh Gregorian, “Trump Digs In On Central Park 5: ‘They Admitted Their Guilt,’ NBC News, June 18, 2019; https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-digs-central-park-5-they-admitted-their-guilt-n1019156.

[21] Nina Totenberg, “Who Is Judge Gonzalo Curiel, The Man Trump Attacked For His Mexican Ancestry?” NPR, June 7, 2016; https://www.npr.org/2016/06/07/481140881/who-is-judge-gonzalo-curiel-the-man-trump-attacked-for-his-mexican-ancestry.

[22] Glenn Thrush, “Under Ben Carson, HUD Scales Back Fair Housing Enforcement,” New York Times, March 28, 2018; https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/28/us/ben-carson-hud-fair-housing-discrimination.html.  The activity only increased over time.  See Hailey Fuchs, “Trump Moves to Roll Back Obama Program Addressing Housing Discrimination,” New York Times, July 23, 2020; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/politics/trump-housing-discrimination-suburbs.html.

[23] News Division, “Thabiti Anyabwile Says All Whites Are Complicit in Murdering Martin Luther King, Jr.” Pulpit and Pen, April 5, 2018; https://pulpitandpen.org/2018/04/05/thabiti-anyabwile-says-whites-complicit-murdering-martin-luther-king-jr/.

[24] Pulpit and Pen, “If Thabiti Anyabwile is Really Sorry, He’ll Change His Name,” Pulpit and Pen, July 19, 2019; https://pulpitandpen.org/2019/07/19/if-thabiti-anyabwile-is-really-sorry-hell-change-his-name/.

[25] Debbie Lynn Kespert, “The Outspoken TULIP’s Statement of Faith,” The Outspoken TULIP; https://headstickdeb.com/the-outspoken-tulips-statement-of-faith/.

[26] Debbie Lynn Kespert, “Explaining My TULIP,” The Outspoken TULIP; https://headstickdeb.com/explaining-my-tulip/.

[27] First Baptist Church of Weymouth, “Doctrinal Statement,” https://www.fbcweymouth.org/page/doctrinal-statement.

[28] Debbie Lynn Kespert, “Autobiography With Purpose,” The Outspoken TULIP; https://headstickdeb.com/autobiography-with-purpose/.

[29] Kespert linked the phrase “writing on racial issues as a white woman” to: https://headstickdeb.com/2018/04/09/when-a-white-woman-fears-to-be-outspoken/.

[30] Kespert linked the phrase “my attempts to acknowledge” to: https://headstickdeb.com/2018/04/10/worshiping-together-and-understanding-differences/. 

[31] Kespert linked the phrase “but that God doesn’t hold me responsible” to: https://headstickdeb.com/2018/04/11/bearing-my-great-great-grandfathers-guilt/.

[32] Debbie Lynn Kespert, “Are White Evangelicals Guilty Of Assassinating Martin Luther King, Jr?” The Outspoken TULIP: Discipling Women for Discernment Through Doctrine, April 13, 2018; https://headstickdeb.com/2018/04/13/are-white-evangelicals-guilty-of-assassinating-martin-luther-king-jr/

[33] https://biblehub.com/greek/859.htm.

[34] Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 5.17.3.  Irenaeus even joined the quote about the handwriting with the language about us owing God a debt.  Irenaeus means that since the fall, each human being owes God the debt of our human nature, as God calls us to return our human nature to in a purified and perfected state – something which we can only do with Jesus, by his Spirit. 

[35] Philip R. Johnson, “Against Mission Drift,” Pyromaniacs: Setting the World on Fire, February 11, 2016; http://teampyro.blogspot.com/2016/02/against-mission-drift.html.

[36] Thabiti Anyabwile, “I’m Happy to Talk with Dr. Phil,” The Gospel Coalition, February 11, 2016; https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/thabiti-anyabwile/im-happy-to-talk-with-dr-phil/.

[37] https://twitter.com/Phil_Johnson_/status/981955880185880576.

[38] The Editorial Board, “America’s Federally Financed Ghettos,” New York Times, April 7, 2018; https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/07/opinion/sunday/americas-federally-financed-ghettos.html.

[39] Philip R. Johnson, “In Which I Make Some Concessions to Thabiti Anyabwile,” http://www.romans45.org/misc/Thabiti.pdf.  See also Philip R. Johnson, “Against Mission Drift,” Pyromaniacs: Setting the World on Fire, February 11, 2016; http://teampyro.blogspot.com/2016/02/against-mission-drift.html displays an earlier exchange between

[40] Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)

[41] Philip R. Johnson, “In Which I Make Some Concessions to Thabiti Anyabwile”;  http://www.romans45.org/misc/Thabiti.pdf.

[42] Jonathan Reider, “MLK’s Case for Reparations Included Disadvantaged Whites,” The Root, July 15, 2014; https://www.theroot.com/mlk-s-case-for-reparations-included-disadvantaged-white-1790876391.

[43] Ibid.  See also Wale Hudson-Roberts, “Martin Luther King Jr and the Question of Reparations,” Christian Today, December 4, 2021; https://www.christiantoday.com/article/martin.luther.king.jr.and.the.question.of.reparations/137794.htm. Michael Harriot, “Exclusive: Martin Luther King Jr. Talks Reparations, White Economic Anxiety and Guaranteed Income in Previously Unheard Speech,” The Root, September 5, 2019; https://www.theroot.com/exclusive-martin-luther-king-jr-talks-reparations-wh-1837907942.

[44] Philip R. Johnson, “In Which I Make Some Concessions to Thabiti Anyabwile,” http://www.romans45.org/misc/Thabiti.pdf says, “He’s right that I’m fluent in snark. I haven’t been able to keep that a secret. He’s right therefore that I didn’t take offense or assume he literally meant what he said. I got the hyperbole.”

[45] For a fuller treatment of the reliance of Christian atonement theology on Jewish debt laws and the Jubilee debt repayment practices, see Athanasius as Evangelist, Part 6: Jesus Paid the Debt to God, and Helps You Pay the Debt You Still Owe to God, Too, found here: https://www.anastasiscenterblog.org/athanasius-trinity-nicene-creed/post-6-jesus-helps-you-pay-your-debt-to-god 

[46] Michael Rhodes, “Should We Repent of Our Grandparents’ Racism? Scripture on Intergenerational Sin,” The Biblical Mind, June 19, 2020; https://hebraicthought.org/repenting-intergenerational-racist-ideology-scripture-intergenerational-sin/.

[47] And besides, Jesus had already traded insults to the highest level with the Jewish leaders.  They wanted to cast aspersions on Jesus’ ancestry; Jesus had already called them children of the devil, and not of God, because of their lies (Jn.8:44 – 47); within the criteria of relevance, there could be no statement more scathing. 

[48] Jesus’ high priestly prayer in John 13 – 17 also shows Jesus’ intention of spiritually forming the Christian community into action on one another’s behalf.  Jesus’ stress on love and oneness would be important.

[49] David Bentley Hart, “A Prayer for the Poor,” University of Notre Dame Church Life Journal, June 5, 2018; https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/a-prayer-for-the-poor/.

[50] Alura, “Brief Comments on David Bentley Hart’s Article Concerning the Lord’s Prayer,” Shameless Orthodoxy, June 12, 2018; https://shamelessorthodoxy.com/2018/06/12/brief-comments-on-david-bentley-harts-article-concerning-the-lords-prayer/.

[51] Clement of Rome, First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians 55; Apostolic Constitutions 4.2.9; Augustine of Hippo, Epistulae 10 discussed by Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society in Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 37 – 38.

[52] Father Stephen Freeman, “The Sins of a Nation,” Glory to God for All Things, June 4, 2020; https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2020/06/04/the-sins-of-a-nation-3/. 

[53] Glenn Thrush, “Under Ben Carson, HUD Scales Back Fair Housing Enforcement,” New York Times, March 28, 2018; https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/28/us/ben-carson-hud-fair-housing-discrimination.html.  The activity only increased over time.  See Hailey Fuchs, “Trump Moves to Roll Back Obama Program Addressing Housing Discrimination,” New York Times, July 23, 2020; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/politics/trump-housing-discrimination-suburbs.html.

[54] Glenn Thrush, “Trump Attacks a Suburban Housing Program. Critics See a Play for White Votes.” New York Times, July 1, 2020; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/us/politics/trump-obama-housing-discrimination.html.

[55] Tina Nguyen, “Steve Bannon Has a Nazi Problem,” Vanity Fair, September 12, 2017; https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09/steve-bannon-has-a-nazi-problem portrays Bannon as an economic nationalist by ideology, who only politically uses white supremacy as a political tool and as a distraction for Democrats to fixate upon.  However, see American Defense League, “Steve Bannon: Five Things to Know,” American Defense League; https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounders/steve-bannon-five-things-to-know.  Emma Niles, “Is Stephen Bannon a White Supremacist, or Is He Just ‘Using the Alt-Right’?” Truthdig, December 4, 2016; https://www.truthdig.com/articles/is-stephen-bannon-a-white-supremacist-or-is-he-just-using-the-alt-right/. Bethania Palma, “Steve Bannon Accused of Having White Supremacist Views,” Snopes, November 14, 2016; https://www.snopes.com/news/2016/11/14/steve-bannon-accused-of-having-white-supremacist-views/. Paul Rosenberg, “Behind Trump's Push for Civil War: A Deep History of White Supremacist Paranoia,” Salon, September 26, 2020; https://www.salon.com/2020/09/26/behind-trumps-push-for-civil-war-a-deep-history-of-white-supremacist-paranoia/.

[56] Adela Suliman, “Trump’s Pardon of Blackwater Contractors Convicted of Massacre Greeted with Derision, Grief,” NBC News, December 23, 2020; https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/trump-s-pardon-blackwater-contractors-convicted-massacre-greeted-derision-grief-n1252224.

[57] Ed Dingess, Reformed Reasons; https://reformedreasons.com/. 

[58] Ed Dingess, “Thabiti Anyabwile, The Heretic,” Reformation Charlotte, March 24, 2019; https://reformationcharlotte.org/2019/03/24/thabiti-anyabwile-heretic/

[59] Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p.11 aptly points out that “retributive justice” (Latin iustitia distributiva) does not capture the essence of the Hebrew law and the Sinai covenant.  McGrath also believes that “retributive justice” should not serve as the background for Paul’s and James’ definition of “justification.”  Doing so, in his view, is a category mistake and a linguistic error as we translate Hebrew into Greek and Latin: 

“Although there are many instances where sedaqa can be regarded as corresponding to the concept of iustitia distributiva, which has come to dominate western thinking on the nature of justice (despite the rival claims of iustitia commutativa), there remains a significant number which cannot. A particularly significant illustration of this may be found in the Old Testament attitude to the poor, needy and destitute. As we have noted, sedaqa refers to the ‘right order of affairs’ which is violated, at least in part, by the very existence of such unfortunates. God’s sedaqa is such that God must deliver them from their plight – and it is this aspect of the Hebrew concept of sedaqa which has proved so intractable to those who attempted to interpret it solely as iustitia distributiva.”

[60] Caleb Parke, “Atlanta Pastor Louie Giglio ‘Deeply Sorry’ for Calling Slavery ‘White Blessing’,” Fox News, June 18, 2020; https://www.foxnews.com/us/louie-giglio-lecrae-white-blessing-apology-video.

[61] Joe Rigney, “The Enticing Sin of Empathy: How Satan Corrupts Through Compassion,” Desiring God, May 31, 2019; https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-enticing-sin-of-empathy.  Rigney succeeded John Piper as president of Bethlehem College and Seminary.  Rigney was critiqued by Rebecca Davis, “ “Your Empathy Is a Sin”: A Response to Desiring God,” Here’s the Joy, June 17, 2019; https://heresthejoy.com/2019/06/your-empathy-is-a-sin-a-response-to-desiring-god/ and Mark Wingfield, “Have You Heard the One About Empathy Being a Sin?” Baptist News Global, August 24, 2021; https://baptistnews.com/article/have-you-heard-the-one-about-empathy-being-a-sin/#.YhLzV-jMKUk. Wingfield points out: 

“In this week’s edition of Christianity Today appears a lengthy report on the fallout that’s been happening at Bethlehem Baptist Church and Bethlehem College and Seminary, where not only leaders but long-time congregants have been exiting. One of the common threads in their explanations for leaving is that Piper, Rigney and others have created a toxic culture of abuse that is devoid of anything like empathy.

The controversy has reached such a level that the church, where Piper served as pastor for 33 years, has delayed celebration of its 150th anniversary.

The evangelical magazine reports: “Three pastors and a staff member resigned from the downtown campus of Bethlehem Baptist Church in recent months, alongside dozens of lay members. Another four faculty and staff left the college and seminary in the past year.”

Among a constellation of issues that seem to have coalesced in this moment are debates about racial justice, Critical Race Theory, the #MeToo movement, and the nature of trauma and abuse, the story explains. “Beneath this constellation of hot topics, though, there’s also a deeper philosophical disagreement over how to approach the various conflicts themselves. At its heart are questions over whether, when and how Christians might challenge those who say they are hurting — and how they balance calls to show compassion, seek out truth, and repent of sin in such situations.”

In other words, at the root of the conflict is a debate about empathy.”

[62] Reformation Charlotte, “While SBC Pastor and The Gospel Coalition Push For Reparations, The Bible is Clear that Whites Owe Nothing,” Reformation Charlotte, October 10, 2019; https://reformationcharlotte.org/2019/10/10/while-sbc-pastor-and-the-gospel-coalition-push-for-reparations-the-bible-is-clear-that-whites-owe-nothing/.