R.C. Sproul's Blog, page 83

Take Away the Resurrection and You Take Away Christianity

Here is the watershed of human history where the misery of the race is transformed into grandeur. Here the kerygma, the proclamation of the early church, was born with the cry "He is risen." We can view this event as a symbol, a lovely tale of hope. We can reduce it to a moralism that declares, as one preacher put it, "The meaning of the Resurrection is that we can face the dawn of each new day with dialectical courage."

The New Testament proclaims the Resurrection as sober historical fact. The early Christians were not interested in dialectical symbols but in concrete realities. Authentic Christianity stands or falls with the space/time event of Jesus' resurrection. The term Christian suffers from the burden of a thousand qualifications and a myriad of diverse definitions. One dictionary defines a Christian as a person who is civilized. One can certainly be civilized without affirming the Resurrection, but one cannot then be a Christian in the biblical sense. The person who claims to be a Christian while denying the Resurrection speaks with a forked tongue. From such turn away.

The resurrection of Jesus is radical in the original sense of the word. It touches the radix, the "root" of the Christian faith. Without it Christianity becomes just another religion designed to titillate our moral senses with platitudes of human wisdom. The apostle Paul spelled out the clear and irrefutable consequences of a "resurrectionless" Christianity. If Christ is not raised, he reasoned, we are left with the following list of conclusions:

Our preaching is futile.
Our faith is in vain.
We have misrepresented God.
We are still in our sins.
Our loved ones who have died have perished.
If all we have is hope, we are of all men most to be pitied.

These six consequences sharply reveal the inner connection of the Resurrection to the substance of Christianity. The resurrection of Jesus is the sine qua non of the Christian faith. Take away the Resurrection and you take away Christianity.

This excerpt is from Who Is Jesus? by R.C. Sproul. Download all 28 Crucial Questions ebooks for free here.

Free to Stream: Resources on Christ's Resurrection

This weekend, watch Resurrection, a message from R.C. Sproul’s teaching series What Did Jesus Do? As he considers the redemptive significance of the resurrection of Jesus, Dr. Sproul explains that Christ’s defeat of the grave is at the very core of the Christian faith.

To continue your study of Christ’s resurrection, stream these messages next:

Watch R.C. Sproul’s message: He Is Risen!: The Resurrection and Worship
Watch R.C Sproul’s message: The Resurrection
Watch Alistair Begg’s message: He Is Not Here: The Significance of the Empty Tomb
List to Sinclair Ferguson’s message: Resurrection
Watch W. Robert Godfrey’s Message: Death Has List Its Sting
Watch Steven Lawson’s message: He Is Not Here: The Resurrection of Christ
Watch Derek Thomas’ message: Christ and Him Resurrected

Browse all of the ways we are seeking to serve you with teaching and discipleship resources during the present health crisis:

All teaching series are currently free to stream
Study guides are also now available to download for free
You can watch each of the sessions from our recent online livestream event, Made in the Image of God
Study groups at Ligonier Connect have been made free during this time
Our 20+ teaching series on Amazon Prime are freely available to Prime members
Two of R.C. Sproul’s children’s books are available as animatic videos on YouTube
You can listen anytime, every day to RefNet
If you don’t subscribe already, try Tabletalk magazine for three months
You can also get Tabletalk for your church or Bible study for $1 per issue
Finally, you can request a free copy of the booklet God Is Holy by R.C. Sproul

Denominations in the American Religious Experience

Can Christians disagree about some matters and still recognize one another as true believers? In this brief clip, W. Robert Godfrey examines the crucial role that denominations play in the American religious experience.

Transcript:

Freedom of religion means that all denominations are treated equally under law. Nobody has a superior place under law. That really then leads on, of course, to the notion that religious freedom is tied to the separation of church and state. Now, there were different notions of the separation of church and state in the time of the American Revolution, but clearly there was a notion that would not been an established church so that all denominations could enjoy freedom. The very idea of denominations is crucial to American religious experience. Denominationalism, as a way of thinking, says that the true church of Jesus Christ finds expression in a variety of organizations, so that one is not obligated to say, “If I am a Presbyterian and you are a Baptist, you are a member of a false church because it’s not my church.” That was the old way of thinking. There were only true churches and false churches, and mine was the true church and yours was the false. But has happened in the course of 17th, 18th, and leading on into the 19th century is the rise of this notion that we can have dominations. We are separated over certain things, but we can recognize that at a fundamental level we are all still Christians, we are all still going to heaven. Presbyterians are getting a first-class ticket, Baptists a second-class ticket, but we’re all going. We take that attitude so for granted that we don’t recognize how revolutionary it is in the history of Christianity. Really, up until the 17th century, Christians fundamentally had believed that there is only one true church and all others are false churches. But the Westminster Confession of Faith itself talks about purer and less pure churches. So, if you are a Bible-believing Baptist, you think your Baptist church is purer than the Presbyterian church on the issue of baptism. But you are willing to grant, if you are an easygoing Baptist, that the Presbyterians may get to heaven too, and this is an important part of America’s religious experience.

How Should Christians Respond to Times of Suffering?

When crisis strikes, people often say, “I’ll never be the same after this.” The real danger would be that we’re left exactly the same after the dust has settled. From our livestream event Made in the Image of God, Sinclair Ferguson examines how Christians should respond to the suffering of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To ask a biblical or theological question, just visit ask.Ligonier.org or message us on Facebook or Twitter.

Read the Transcript

The Design and Scope of the Atonement

In an age wherein the ground of theology has been saturated by the torrential downpour of existential thinking, it seems almost suicidal, like facing the open floodgates riding a raft made of balsa wood, to appeal to a seventeenth-century theologian to address a pressing theological issue. Nothing evokes more snorts from the snouts of anti-rational zealots than appeals to sages from the era of Protestant Scholasticism.

“Scholasticism” is the pejorative term applied by so-called “Neo-Orthodox” (better spelled without the “e” in Neo), or “progressive” Reformed thinkers who embrace the “Spirit” of the Reformation while eschewing its “letter” to the seventeenth-century Reformed thinkers who codified the insights of their sixteenth-century magisterial forebears. To the scoffers of this present age, Protestant Scholasticism is seen as a reification or calcification of the dynamic and liquid forms of earlier Reformed insight. It is viewed as a deformation from the lively, sanguine rediscovery of biblical thought to a deadly capitulation to the “Age of Reason,” whereby the vibrant truths of redemption were reduced to logical propositions and encrusted in dry theological tomes and arid creedal formulations such as the Westminster Confession of Faith.

The besetting sin of men like Francis Turretin and John Owen was their penchant for precision and clarity in doctrinal statements. As J. I. Packer observed in his introduction of John Owen’s classic work, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ:

“Those who see no need for doctrinal exactness and have no time for theological debates which show up divisions between so-called Evangelicals may well regret its reappearance … . Owen’s work is a constructive broad-based biblical analysis of the heart of the gospel, and must be taken seriously as such … . Nobody has the right to dismiss the doctrine of the limitedness of the atonement as a monstrosity of Calvinistic logic until he has refuted Owen’s proof that it is part of the uniform biblical presentation of redemption, clearly taught in plain text after plain text.”

The “monster” created by Calvinistic logic to which Packer refers is the doctrine of limited atonement. The so-called “Five points of Calvinism” (growing out of a dispute with Remonstrants (Arminians) in Holland in the early seventeenth century) have been popularized by the acrostic T-U-L-I-P, spelling out the finest flower in God’s garden:

T — Total Depravity

U — Unconditional Election

L — Limited Atonement

I — Irresistible Grace

P — Perseverance of the Saints.

Many who embrace a view of God’s sovereign grace in election are willing to embrace the Tulip if one of its five petals is lopped off. Those calling themselves “four-point Calvinists” desire to knock the “L” out of Tulip.

On the surface, it seems that of the “five points” of Tulip, the doctrine of limited atonement presents the most difficulties. Does not the Bible teach over and over that Jesus died for the whole world? Is not the scope of the atonement worldwide? The most basic affirmation the Evangelical recites is John 3:16: “For God so loved the world … .”

On the other hand, it seems to me that the easiest of the five points to defend is limited atonement. But this facility must get under the surface to be manifested. The deepest penetration under that surface is the one provided by Owen in The Death of Death in the Death of Christ.

First, we ask if the atonement of Christ was a real atonement? Did Jesus really, or only potentially, satisfy the demands of God’s justice? If indeed Christ provided a propitiation and expiation for all human beings and for all their sins, then, clearly, all persons would be saved. Universal atonement, if it is actual, and not merely potential, means universal salvation.

However, the overwhelming majority of Christians who reject limited atonement also reject universal salvation. They are particularists, not universalists. They insist on the doctrine of justification by faith alone. That is, only believers are saved by the atonement of Christ.

If that is so, then the atonement, in some sense, must be limited, or restricted, to a definite group, namely believers. If Christ died for all of the sins of all people, that must include the sin of unbelief. If God’s justice is totally satisfied by Christ’s work on the cross, then it would follow that God would be unjust in punishing the unrepentant sinner for his unbelief and impenitence because those sins were already paid for by Christ.

People usually get around this by citing the axiom, “Christ’s atonement was sufficient for all, but efficient only for some. What does this mean? The Calvinist would interpret this axiom to mean that the value of Christ’s sacrifice is so high, His merit so extensive, that its worth is equal to cover all the sins of the human race. But the atonement’s benefits are only efficient for believers, the elect. The non-Calvinist interprets this axiom in slightly different terms: Christ’s atonement was good enough to save everyone — and was intended to make salvation possible for everyone. But that intent is realized only by believers. The atonement is efficient (or “works”) only for those who receive its benefits by faith.

As I said, this is still a form of “limited atonement.” Its efficacy is limited by human response. Sadly, this kind of limit puts a limit on the saving work of Christ far greater than any limit of the atonement viewed by Reformed theology.

The real issue was the design, or purpose, of God’s plan in laying upon His Son the burden of the Cross. Was it God’s purpose simply to make salvation possible for all but certain for none? Did God have to wait to see if any would respond to Christ to make His atonement efficient? Was it theoretically possible that Jesus would die “for all” yet never see the fruit of His travail and be satisfied?

Or was it God’s eternal purpose and design of the Cross to make salvation certain for His elect? Was there a special sense in which Christ died for His own, for the sheep the Father had given Him?

Here our understanding of the nature of God impacts strongly and decisively our understanding of the design and scope of the Atonement. To deal with every biblical text that bears on those questions, the best source I know of is John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ.

This post was originally published in Tabletalk magazine.

$5 Friday (And More): The Doctrines of Grace, Martin Luther, & Sanctification

It’s time for our weekly $5 Friday sale. This week’s resources include such topics as the doctrines of grace, Martin Luther, sanctification, Moses, faith, repentance, and more.

Plus, several bonus resources are also available for more than $5. These have been significantly discounted from their original price. This week’s bonus resources include:

Luther: The Life and Legacy of the German Reformer , DVD $20 $12
Tough Questions Christians Face: 2010 National Conference , DVD $67.50 $12
Marks of a Healthy Church , DVD $48.60 $12
Marks of a Healthy Church , Study guide $12 $8
Christian Worldview , DVD $43.20 $12
Christian Ethics , CD $34.20 $10
Pleasing God , DVD $21.60 $10
Living for God’s Glory: An Introduction to Calvinism , Hardcover $19.20 $14
The Christ of Wisdom , Paperback book $16 $14
City of God , Paperback book $14.40 $8
Faith Alone , Paperback book $14.40 $10
Burning Bush Journal , $12 $6
Post Tenebras Lux: A Symphonic Celebration of the Protestant Reformation , CD $3.20 $2.25
Who Do You Say That I Am?: December 2014 Tabletalk , Magazine $3 $1
Remembering God: December 2016 Tabletalk , Magazine $3 $1
Faith and Repentance: June 2013 Tabletalk , Magazine $3 $1
What's so New about the New Covenant?: May 2014 Tabletalk , Magazine $3 $1

Sale runs through 12:01 a.m.–11:59 p.m. Friday ET.

View today’s $5 Friday sale items.

Free to Stream: Resources for Good Friday

What happened on the cross of Jesus Christ? Why did He need to die? On this Good Friday, watch The Curse Motif of the Atonement, a classic message from R.C. Sproul. As he traces the theme of atonement from Scripture’s earliest pages, Dr. Sproul shows how Jesus fulfills God’s curse against the sin of His people so that all who come to Him may receive the blessing of God.

To continue your study of Christ’s death and atoning work, stream these messages next:

Listen to R.C. Sproul's entire teaching series: The Atonement of Jesus
Watch R.C. Sproul’s message: Christ Crucified
Watch R.C. Sproul’s message: The Extent of the Atonement
Watch R.C. Sproul’s message: Crucifixion
Watch Steven Lawson’s message: Blessing and Curse
Watch Stephen Nichols’ message: Christ Our Ransom
Watch Derek Thomas’ message: A Curse for Us: The Death of Christ

Browse all of the ways we are seeking to serve you with teaching and discipleship resources during the present health crisis:

All teaching series are currently free to stream
Study guides are also now available to download for free
You can watch each of the sessions from our recent online livestream event, Made in the Image of God
Study groups at Ligonier Connect have been made free during this time
Our 20+ teaching series on Amazon Prime are freely available to Prime members
Two of R.C. Sproul’s children’s books are available as animatic videos on YouTube
You can listen anytime, every day to RefNet
If you don’t subscribe already, try Tabletalk magazine for three months
You can also get Tabletalk for your church or Bible study for $1 per issue
Finally, you can request a free copy of the booklet God Is Holy by R.C. Sproul

Limited Atonement

Here’s an excerpt from Limited Atonement, Jonathan Gibson's contribution to the April issue of Tabletalk:

J.C. Ryle once commented that “the absence of accurate definitions is the very life of religious controversy.” This is especially so when it comes to the doctrine of limited atonement. The adjective limited by its very name creates a problem. In redemptive history, Christ’s atonement is the climax of God’s long-anticipated salvation, so why would anyone want to limit it?

Of course, at one level, everyone limits Christ’s atonement: some limit its scope (it is for God’s elect only); others limit its efficacy (it does not save everyone for whom it was intended). Thus, it’s not whether one will limit Christ’s atonement; it’s just how. For this reason, I propose a more positive and less ambiguous term: definite atonement.

Continue reading Limited Atonement, or begin receiving Tabletalk magazine by signing up for a free 3-month trial.

For a limited time, the new TabletalkMagazine.com allows everyone to browse and read the growing library of back issues, including this month’s issue.

The Scope of God's Greatness

The history of the world is summarized in one sentence: “For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things” (Rom. 11:36). In this brief clip, H.B. Charles Jr. helps us to meditate on the transcendent greatness of Almighty God.

Transcript:

Let me help you understand the scope of God's greatness. This is the history of the world in one sentence: "For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things." I don't have to know your story, but this is the testimony of your salvation in one sentence: "For from Him and to Him and through Him are all things." This is the story of your life in one sentence: "From Him and through Him and to Him are all things.” God is the first cause and the effective cause and the final cause of all things. He's the source, the Sustainer, and significance of all things. He's the source and the force and the course of all things. He is the Originator of all things. He perpetuates all things. He terminates all things. He is the foundation of all things, the Being of all things, the purpose of all things. He is Alpha and Omega and every letter in between. "For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things."

What Do Expiation and Propitiation Mean?

When we talk about the vicarious aspect of the atonement, two rather technical words come up again and again: expiation and propitiation. These words spark all kinds of arguments about which one should be used to translate a particular Greek word, and some versions of the Bible will use one of these words and some will use the other one. I'm often asked to explain the difference between propitiation and expiation. The difficulty is that even though these words are in the Bible, we don't use them as part of our day-to-day vocabulary, so we aren't sure exactly what they are communicating in Scripture. We lack reference points in relation to these words.

Expiation and Propitiation

Let's think about what these words mean, then, beginning with the word expiation. The prefix ex means "out of" or "from," so expiation has to do with removing something or taking something away. In biblical terms, it has to do with taking away guilt through the payment of a penalty or the offering of an atonement. By contrast, propitiation has to do with the object of the expiation. The prefix pro means "for," so propitiation brings about a change in God's attitude, so that He moves from being at enmity with us to being for us. Through the process of propitiation, we are restored into fellowship and favor with Him.

In a certain sense, propitiation has to do with God's being appeased. We know how the word appeasement functions in military and political conflicts. We think of the so-called politics of appeasement, the philosophy that if you have a rambunctious world conqueror on the loose and rattling the sword, rather than risk the wrath of his blitzkrieg you give him the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia or some such chunk of territory. You try to assuage his wrath by giving him something that will satisfy him so that he won't come into your country and mow you down. That's an ungodly manifestation of appeasement. But if you are angry or you are violated, and I satisfy your anger, or appease you, then I am restored to your favor and the problem is removed.

The same Greek word is translated by both the words expiation and propitiation from time to time. But there is a slight difference in the terms. Expiation is the act that results in the change of God's disposition toward us. It is what Christ did on the cross, and the result of Christ's work of expiation is propitiation—God's anger is turned away. The distinction is the same as that between the ransom that is paid and the attitude of the one who receives the ransom.

Christ's Work Was an Act of Placation

Together, expiation and propitiation constitute an act of placation. Christ did His work on the cross to placate the wrath of God. This idea of placating the wrath of God has done little to placate the wrath of modern theologians. In fact, they become very wrathful about the whole idea of placating God's wrath. They think it is beneath the dignity of God to have to be placated, that we should have to do something to soothe Him or appease Him. We need to be very careful in how we understand the wrath of God, but let me remind you that the concept of placating the wrath of God has to do here not with a peripheral, tangential point of theology, but with the essence of salvation.

What Is Salvation?

Let me ask a very basic question: what does the term salvation mean? Trying to explain it quickly can give you a headache, because the word salvation is used in about seventy different ways in the Bible. If somebody is rescued from certain defeat in battle, he experiences salvation. If somebody survives a life-threatening illness, that person experiences salvation. If somebody's plants are brought back from withering to robust health, they are saved. That's biblical language, and it's really no different than our own language. We save money. A boxer is saved by the bell, meaning he's saved from losing the fight by knockout, not that he is transported into the eternal kingdom of God. In short, any experience of deliverance from a clear and present danger can be spoken of as a form of salvation.

When we talk about salvation biblically, we have to be careful to state that from which we ultimately are saved. The apostle Paul does just that for us in 1 Thessalonians 1:10, where he says Jesus "delivers us from the wrath to come." Ultimately, Jesus died to save us from the wrath of God. We simply cannot understand the teaching and the preaching of Jesus of Nazareth apart from this, for He constantly warned people that the whole world someday would come under divine judgment. Here are a few of His warnings concerning the judgment: "'I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment'" (Matt. 5:22); "'I say to you that for every idle word men may speak, they will give account of it in the day of judgment'" (Matt. 12:36); and "'The men of Nineveh will rise up in the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and indeed a greater than Jonah is here'" (Matt. 12:41). Jesus' theology was a crisis theology. The Greek word crisis means "judgment." And the crisis of which Jesus preached was the crisis of an impending judgment of the world, at which point God is going to pour out His wrath against the unredeemed, the ungodly, and the impenitent. The only hope of escape from that outpouring of wrath is to be covered by the atonement of Christ.

Therefore, Christ's supreme achievement on the cross is that He placated the wrath of God, which would burn against us were we not covered by the sacrifice of Christ. So if somebody argues against placation or the idea of Christ satisfying the wrath of God, be alert, because the gospel is at stake. This is about the essence of salvation—that as people who are covered by the atonement, we are redeemed from the supreme danger to which any person is exposed. It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of a holy God who's wrathful. But there is no wrath for those whose sins have been paid. That is what salvation is all about.

This excerpt is adpated from The Truth of the Cross by R.C. Sproul.