The Tools It Gives Us

This is the third post on why the EFCA's revision of our doctrinal statement is a good thing. In the first post, I gave an overview and linked to an article from Christianity Today that walks through the revised statement. In the second post, I talked about the process and the spirit with which the revision was done.

Now I would like to write briefly about the theological tools that the revised statement gives us. The revised SOF has "beefed up" statements on the doctrine of God, the inerrancy of Scripture, the hypostatic union in the person of Christ, justification by faith alone, the atonement, and individual responsibility to repent and believe. Things that were assumed by the writers of the 1950 SOF are no longer taken for granted among some who call themselves evangelicals. And so that which was assumed must now be made explicit in order to safeguard the faith "delivered once for all to the saints" (Jude 3). I'll focus on two issues in particular now: divine foreknowledge and penal substitution. Without doing a series of posts on each of these issues, I cannot do justice to either of them in this post. So I will only give a summary of what is involved and how the revised SOF handles each of them.

Open theism is the view that God does not exhaustively know the future, not because God is not all-knowing, but because the future is indeterminate and therefore not knowable. For a summary of the issues and the parties involved, read this post by Tim Challies, and for a list of resources available online critiquing openness, go to this page from Monergism.com. One excellent book that the EFCA has made available at its conferences is Steve Roy's How Much Does God Foreknow? My key concern is how to square the indeterminacy of the future with statements in the Bible such as Isaiah 48:5, which seems to indicate that one crucial difference between the true God and false gods is knowledge of the future. It seems clear to me that Scripture plainly teaches God's exhaustive knowledge of the future, and that any view to the contrary involves undermining our view of Scripture.

An advocate of open theism could have signed off on the 1950 EFCA Statement of Faith. But the revision says that God is not only "infinitely perfect" but has "limitless knowledge and sovereign power." What a tremendous improvement! And what an important safeguard to preserve our understanding of God's foreknowledge!

Penal substitution is the understanding that God satisfied His own wrath against sinners by sending His Son as a perfect substitute on behalf of sinners to bear His wrath. It is the doctrine at the heart of justification by faith, central to the Reformation, and the hope and confidence of Christians for centuries. And today it is under attack by some who would call themselves evangelical. One scholar even referred to it as "cosmic child abuse," as if the Father gleefully inflicted vengeance on His unwilling Son. Once again the arguments can get complicated, though the single volume that best addresses them at a fairly accessible level is Pierced for Our Transgressions. Not only do these attacks undermine the only righteousness that any of us can hope to have as we stand before our Creator, King, and Judge, they do not square with straightforward readings of Isaiah 53, Romans 3:21-26, and 1 Peter 3:18. That is only a smattering of passages -- at Bethel we will spend three months of Sundays preaching through passages throughout the Bible to understand what happened in the atonement.

A critic of penal substitution could have signed off on the 1950 EFCA Statement of Faith, which only states that Jesus was "a sacrifice for sins." But the revision says human beings are "under [God's] wrath," that Christ is "our representative and substitute" and that His "atoning death" is the "perfect, all-sufficient sacrifice for our sins." Again we see the improvement, in which what was assumed is made explicit. And again we see the safeguarding of the glorious riches of God in the gospel of Jesus Christ!

I could say more about the Scriptures, about the person of Christ, about the ordinances, and much more. And this fall when we teach through the revised SOF in Adult Life Training at Bethel, I will. The revised SOF gives us wonderful theological tools for helping us to understand and safeguard the gospel.