Preface

A Tract for the Times

A century ago, G. K. Chesterton declared that it was beyond the wit of man to invent a new heresy. It seems that he was right, and that this is a truth to take to heart today. Heresies clothe themselves in up-to-date cultural garb and present themselves, face-lifted and iPod-armed, as the latest and wisest thing going, but current heresies, of which there are many, regularly prove, as their predecessors did, to be new forms of old mistakes. This book addresses what we see as a case in point.

We shall not, however, be calling it heresy, for this term today combines maximum fuzziness of meaning with maximum vituperative emotional heat. Such a word is literally too hot to handle in what purports to be sober analysis. We shall speak instead of unorthodoxy, a word that seems to us both more exact and less explosive.

Orthodoxy means right doctrinal belief, viewed as the church's confession of its faith and stated syllabus for teaching. Unorthodoxy means any deviation from that standard. It is, then, a form of unorthodoxy that we are currently seeking to counter.

Can we say that the Christian church, taken as a whole, actually has an orthodoxy? Some would say no, but our answer is yes. It is found in the churches' creeds and confessions, in their hymns and worship forms, and in the writings of their approved theologians. Does this orthodoxy extend to all the beliefs of all the churches? No. For example: on the nature and authority of the church and its clergy, on the number and working of the sacraments, and on the functioning of holy Scripture as a rule of faith and life, what is held as orthodox by Roman Catholicism and with less precision by Eastern Orthodoxy seems less than orthodox-unorthodox, therefore, or heterodox-to adherents of historic Protestant evangelicalism; and Protestantism itself is split down the middle on some secondary matters, such as whether baptizing believers' infants is part of God's prescribed way or not. The present writers, an elderly Canadian Anglican and a middle-aged Southern Baptist, heartily disagree on that subject, though on everything of prime importance, as we see it, such as the truth of the Trinity and of the incarnation, all humanity's need for salvation from the guilt and power of sin, the present heavenly reign and future visible return of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the way of salvation through faith, and faith alone, in him, we regard each other as a standard and bastion of orthodoxy. What we now seek to meet is a challenge to the truly catholic and truly evangelical belief system that we share.

No recognized name exists for the unorthodoxy that we have in view, so we coin one. On the model of anti-Trinitarianism, a fairly familiar term with a clear meaning, and anti-incarnationalism, a word less common but no less clear, we label the generic error we are up against anti-redemptionism. Its essence is sidelining, and in some cases actually denying, the work of Jesus Christ as our redeemer, who did all that had to be done to save us from hell, in favor of the idea of Jesus as teacher, model, and pioneer of godliness. Methodologically, in having Christ's prophetic word thus trump his priestly work, ancient Graeco-Roman Gnosticism and modern Western Protestant liberalism join hands (in a high-five, one might almost say), though, since the preexisting cultural frames into which Jesus' teaching is then made to fit are very different, the results of following the method vary very much also. But the substantive unorthodoxy of this nonbiblical method of proceeding is common to them both. A recent twist in Western liberal unorthodoxy is to say that all accounts of the redemptive work of Christ on the cross must be judged immoral, since violence as such is always immoral, and since penal substitution explicitly ascribes the violence that Jesus suffered to the Father, penal substitution is the most immoral account of all. In this fashion, fueled by one culturally projected, anti-redemptionist axiom after another, the critique of orthodoxy goes on.

It has been said that the best defense of any doctrine is the creative exposition of it. That is the star by which we steer; that is what we hope we have achieved in this book. Apart from the present preface and the epilogue, which are joint efforts, all the pieces that follow are compositions by one or other of us that have received a measure of approval and which, we think, make together a cumulative expository case. J. I. Packer's "Penal Substitution Revisited" was published in a slightly shorter form in NB: News, British UCCF's house magazine, July 2007. "The Heart of the Gospel" is chapter 18 of his Knowing God (1973). "What Did the Cross Achieve? The Logic of Penal Substitution" first appeared in Tyndale Bulletin 25 (1974; pp. 3-45). "Saved by His Precious Blood" was written to introduce a reprint of John Owen, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648) in 1958, and is now chapter 8 of A Quest for Godliness (in Britain, Among God's Giants, 1990). Mark Dever's "Nothing but the Blood" was published in Christianity Today, May 2006.

We offer this book not as a treatise but as a testimony and a composite tract for the times. Our prayer is that God will use it to help his children distinguish things that differ, and to ground them more thoroughly in the truth of Christ.

J. I. Packer

Mark Dever