For Shame

How It Isn't Clever or Interesting to Deny the Existence of Hell and Penal Substitutionary Atonement

File: The Journeyings of the children of Israel from Egypt through the Red Sea and wilderness to the Land of Canaan (FL37116905 3893115).jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Well, shoot, while I was enduring another episode of Meghan Markle Sussex, clips emerged of another program on Netflix involving a man being jilted for going to the wrong kind of church. I think it’s called “Love is Blind” and I haven’t watched it, so I don’t even know why I’m bringing it up.

But also, there are more bothersome troubles going on in the wide world. I guess, as is my wont, I will list them off and see where I land. First of all, a lot of Christians are being murdered in Syria in gruesome and humiliating ways, including being crucified. Second of all, it is being reported that King Charles feted the beginning of Ramadan while forbearing to mention the beginning of Lent, that time when people associated with the church he is ostensibly the head of go to church to confess their sins and receive the sign of the cross in ash to remind them of their mortality.

And finally, I did spend most of yesterday attempting to pour forth deathless prose about Peter Enns, but it was more the literary equivalent of a dry stream bed in the middle of July. I didn’t get very far, is what I’m saying. In the evening I gave up and wandered around Walmart looking for styrofoam, painter’s tape, and spackle. To drown out the bad music piped into the store, I listened to a podcast interview of Professor Enns attempting to explain why he is a Christian as opposed to something else. It’s because that’s the world he was born into, essentially. If he had been born in Syria, I guess, he would have been a Muslim. Beyond that, he is fascinated by the humiliation of the cross.

God, he explains, way back in the Old Testament, was mightily invested in his own honor and glory. When God “felt” humiliated he rectified the situation by killing various populations of people, including, that one time, everyone on earth but Noah and his family. Of course, as Enns explains elsewhere, Noah should not be considered a historical person because the Bible is not a “historical” book in the way you probably thought it was. The flood was just a local catastrophe that, nevertheless, found its way into many ancient texts. Anyway, eventually, along came Jesus—whether he is a historical personage or not, Professor Enns does not know—and he died in the most shameful and humiliating way possible. How can this be?