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As we continue our journey through James Choung’s new book, True Story, we turn to the question of the cross and resurrection. How do the two main events of Christianity fit into Choung’s gospel presentation?

We saw yesterday that Choung leaves out the biblical emphasis on God’s holiness and his righteous Law. Once we eliminate these two aspects of the biblical teaching about God, we are left with a truncated view of Jesus’ death on the cross.

Here is how Choung describes Jesus’ life and death:

“Jesus started his resistance movement to restore the world for better. But he had to do it a certain way. Instead of violent overthrow and killing others, he let his enemies kill him. If this world was diseased by evil and sin, then Jesus went right into the center of it and took it all onto himself. He died brutally. And in death he invited us to put to death the evil in us. All evil and its consequences died with Jesus on the cross. The Bible says we die with Jesus.” (147)

Later, Choung says that “Jesus gets infected and dies on the cross” (211).

Notice that Jesus’ death does not accomplish anything for us; it merely provides us with an invitation to come and die with him. Consider the following statement:

“Everything bent and wrong with us dies with him. That’s what the Bible calls our old selves. But everything that’s right comes back to life in him, our new selves.” (134).

Is Choung saying that there is something inherently good in us that comes back to life? Is he saying that in Jesus’ death only our sins are taken care of? What about the righteous status we need in order to gain access to a holy God? Without a picture of God’s holiness and the demands of God’s Law, these aspects are left undefined.

I agree with Choung that “the work of the cross is way too big to be explained by one theory” (134). I have often written about the danger in reducing the atonement to one particular theory instead of seeing the cross in all of its biblical brilliance. But there is a difference between saying that we need several atonement theories in order to capture the whole biblical teaching (my view) and saying we should dispense with all the theories because none of them are accurate (which appears to be Choung’s view).

Choung never advises us to ditch all the atonement theories. But he implies that we should go in this direction since he does not put forth any atonement theory at all. He repeats the tired caricature of penal substitution as “cosmic child abuse” (51). But instead of correcting the misperception, he abandons that theory altogether and says, “By calling that story the central one, [evangelicals] missed the bigger picture, the truer picture – quite possibly the core of our faith” (51).

The atonement theories are not merely historical inventions! They have basis in the biblical text. And history does not back up Choung’s bold statement about the ransom theory being the earliest (134).

Choung critiques evangelicals for only clinging to one atonement theory at the expense of the others and creating an incomplete picture of the cross. I critique Choung for relativizing all the theories to the point that our only choice is to abandon them all, creating an even more incomplete picture of the cross.

Once the atonement theories disappear, we are left with the vague description of Jesus being “infected” so that we could die to our evil and have our goodness rise again. This weak description leads to the embrace of something akin to Catholicism’s “infusion of grace” instead of imputation of righteousness. “[Jesus] injects us with immunity to inoculate us from sin and evil” (148). “We are being invited into Jesus’ death and resurrection so we can die to our evil selves and live a new life – forgiven and loved. He’s our teacher and we follow his ways.”

So with God’s holiness, his wrath, his Law, and his righteousness absent from the picture, Choung’s presentation still leaves us wondering why Jesus had to die. He is clear on why Jesus died (to invite us to die with him and rise to new life). But he is unclear as to why Jesus had to die. Why do we need Step 3 in Choung’s presentation? Why can’t we go directly from the Fall to the Mission Life. Choung says:

“We need to be transformed so we can take evil full on and not be corrupted by it. We need to go through Jesus…” (170)

Jesus is our power for overcoming sin. But the question still remains: why did he have to die? Why couldn’t the Holy Spirit empower people apart from the cross? Was Jesus’ death the climax of his life, the moment his entire life was pointing to? Or was it something that just happened as he “got infected?”

Ultimately, Jesus is seen as a moral teacher. When you excise his substitutionary death from the picture, you’re left with a man who “started to teach people the way we all should live” (120). “Jesus became one of us to teach us – to show us in word and deed how to truly live… He was a master teacher” (124).

So with Jesus as a moral teacher, Christianity is reduced to “a new way of living, a new way of relating and a new way of organizing” (144). And salvation is not God rescuing us from our sin, but God helping us change our lives. “We need a cure to help us become the people we truly want to be” (107). This sentence leaves me wondering: What do we truly want to be? Without the emphasis on God’s holiness, we are left with a vague description on who we want to be, not who God wants us to be.

When Choung leads someone to the “What next?” stage of presenting the gospel, he says:

“First start to trust Jesus with your life… Admit that we have contributed to the evil on the planet and that we need forgiveness. Receive Jesus’ forgiveness and invite the Holy Spirit into your life. Then, join a community of people who are trying to follow Jesus and bring this new nation into reality.” (178)

Is it just me or does this not seem strikingly similar to the presentations we have grown up with? For all of Choung’s critique of current evangelistic strategies, when it comes to the What do I do? part, he sounds very much like the evangelists he critiques.

I hope this post has helped to point out some of the missing aspects of Choung’s gospel presentation. Though I found much to be commended in Choung’s book, I cannot help but conclude that this gospel is actually less complete and captures less fully the message of the gospel than do many of the traditional presentations he rejects.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at some of the reasons Choung has for writing this book.

written by Trevin Wax  © 2008 Kingdom People blog

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