Book Review: From Heaven He Came and Sought Her

From Heaven He Came and Sought Her: Definite Atonement in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective

Definite Atonement in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective edited by David Gibson & Jonathan Gibson

I knew I wanted to read this exhaustive study of definite atonement the first time I heard about it way back in July of last year. I pre-ordered immediately, waited until it finally arrived mid-December, and began reading right after Christmas, finishing (finally!) a couple of weeks ago.

Yes, it took me more than 5 months to make it through From Heaven He Came, not so much because it’s nearly 700 pages long (although that would be reason enough), but because every one of its pages is dense. I rarely write in a book as much as I have in this one, but I needed heavy marking to understand and remember what I read. Now it’s time to write a review, and this is not easy task, either. How can I sum up a book that took five months to read in one blog post?

Defining

Definite atonement, the doctrine defended within this book, means that 

in the death of Jesus Christ, the triune God intended to achieve the redemption of every person given to the Son by the Father in eternity past, and to apply the accomplishment of his sacrifice to each of them by the Spirit. The death of Christ was intended to win the salvation of God’s people alone (page 33).

You may recognize this quote as a statement of what is more commonly called limited atonement, the L in the TULIP acronym used to represent the five points of Calvinism. But definite atonement is the name used for this doctrine throughout this book and there’s good reason for this: definite atonement is a simply a better descriptor of it. That the atonement is definite means it has a defined purpose and a defined effect. Christ died to save a specific group of people, his people, and his work actually saves all of them.

When someone embraces Calvinism, definite atonement is frequently the last of the five points of Calvinism to be affirmed, and some who accept the other four points who never accept it. If I had to explain this, I’d guess it’s because in a battle of proof texts it can look like definite atonement loses to universal atonement, although this is not really the case, as the biblical argument laid out in this book shows.

Summarizing

From Heaven He Came consists of 23 essays by 21 authors, plus a foreword by J. I. Packe—an interesting choice since Packer also wrote the now-classic introduction to a reprint of John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, the only other work in history that could also be considered a definitive study of definite atonement. The overarching aim of this volume is

to show that history, the Bible, theology, and pastoral practice combine together to provide a framework within which the doctrine of definite atonement is best articulated … (page 37).

Accordingly, the essays are grouped into four sections corresponding with these categories. Contributors include Michael Haykin, Paul Helm, Carl R. Trueman, Tom Schreiner, Robert Letham, Stephen Wellum, Sinclair Ferguson, and John Piper, to list some of the authors you may know. 

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Book Review: Canon Revisited

Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books

Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books by Michael J. Kruger 

I grew up in the Christian faith. I’ve never really doubted that God exists and that he has spoken to us in the Bible. As a child, I simply accepted my Bible as it was without much thought as to how it came to be. But when I reached the questioning teens, I began to think about how we know that our Bible is what it should be. How do we know all the right books are included and none of the wrong ones? Yes, Jesus affirms the Old Testament that the Jews used—and you can’t doubt Jesus—but what about the New Testament? Who affirms it?

The answers I was given didn’t entirely satisfy me. Not that I distrusted my New Testament. I’d already begun to see the Bible as a unified whole and it would have taken a lot to convince me it contained the wrong books. But I still had a niggling feeling that while I believed the New Testament canon was correct, the reasons I had for believing were inadequate.

It’s exactly this question that Michael Kruger’s Canon Revisited seeks to answer: Do Christians have sufficient grounds for affirming the New Testament canon? 

Kruger examines the various approaches that have been used to determine the New Testament canon. The commonly used methods fall into two general categories. The community determined canonical models sees canonicity as something imposed on books by people, either individually or as a group. In the Roman Catholic model, for instance, the authority of the church is necessary for us to know the New Testament canon. As with all community-determined models, the canon is valid because people—in this case, the church—received it. A response from the community is necessary for a canon to exist.

Historically determined canonical models see the canon as something that is determined by the historical merits of the books—or, in some cases, parts of books. The canon is established by historical investigation, asking questions like, “Is this book apostolic?” or “Does this passage contain ‘authentic Jesus tradition’?” As you can imagine, the canons resulting from the different models in this category vary widely. Some affirm all 27 New Testament books and some affirm very few.

Both the community determined models and the historically determined models have strengths, but they share one big problem: “they authenticate the canon on the basis of something external to it.” What’s wrong with this? Kruger argues that “to insist that the canon must measure up to some independent standard that we have erected is to inevitably produce a canon of our own making.”

In the bulk of Canon Revisted, Kruger explains and defends a better model for determining the canon of the New Testament—the self-authenticating model. It’s a little bit like a presuppositional approach to the canon. This method of authenticating the canon is simply “applying Scripture to the question of which books belong to the canon.” 

[I]f the canon bears the very authority of God, to what other standard could it appeal to justify itself? Even when God swore oaths, “he swore by himself” (Heb. 6:13).

It is God who forms the New Testament canon by inspiring books of scripture, and we use principles from the canon of scripture to validate it.

Does this sound a little circular? It might be, but only in the way that authenticating any foundational authority must be circular. And for the Christian, what God says—Scripture—is a fundamental source of knowledge. We cannot, to quote C. S. Lewis, put “God in the dock”; we cannot stand in judgment over him. We presuppose that God’s testimony is reliable, so we use what he says to guide us in our authentication of the canon.

While the self-authenticating model for determining the canon uses extra-biblical data, it does so only under the authority and guidance of Scripture. And “[i]n the end, the self-authenticating model of canon actually serves to unite the various canonical models by acknowledging that no one attribute is ultimate.” Three intertwined attributes which scripture leads us to expect of canonical books confirm the New Testament canon. A canonical book must have divine qualities, apostolic origins, and have been received corporately.

Michael J. Kruger is associate professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary. His research on Christian origins has made him a trusted authority on the development of the New Testament canon. 

Also by Michael Kruger:

The Gospel of the Savior

Gospel Fragments (coauthor) 

The Heresy of Orthodoxy (coauthor)

I wish someone had answered my youthful canon questions using this model. I’m sure the arguments would have given me enough justification for my belief in the canon to satisfy me. 

Canon Revisited is written at a college level, so it’s not a quick read—at least it wasn’t for me—but there’s no prerequisite knowledge required. Everything is explained clearly enough for a novice, either in the text or the footnotes. (Yes, footnotes! And footnotes that are often as engaging as the text.) Still, I wouldn’t recommend it for a teenager, but for a motivated adult.

If you need answers for canon questions—your own or those of others—Canon Revisited is the place to start. Christians can have assurance that the books we have in our New Testament are all the right ones, because, as Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27, ESV).

Book Review: The Atonement

The Atonement: Its Meaning and Significance Its Meaning & Significance by Leon Morris

As church librarian, I do a monthly review of a book found in our church library for the church newsletter. Can you believe that even though I’ve recommended this book over and over, I’ve never done a proper review of it? So here you go, a draft version June’s review. Want to help me proofread/edit it before I sent it off to the newsletter editor? This is the edited version, about 50 words shorter than what I originally posted.

Leon Morris was an Australian New Testament scholar and author most noted for The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, his scholarly work examining the biblical words related to the cross of Christ and defending the historical doctrine of the atonement from the testimony of Scripture. It is considered by many to be a classic, but it’s also a technical book, written by a scholar for other scholars, and not accessible to the layperson.

The Atonement was put together from the material in The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, but presented in a simpler, less technical form. We might think of it as the average Christian’s version of Apostolic Preaching. It’s a biblical study of the terms associated with the atonement—“the great words,” to quote the introduction, “used to bring out the meaning of the cross.” 

Morris shows us the multifaceted nature of the cross work of Christ as described through biblical words—justification, sacrifice, propitiation, redemption, and reconciliation, to list a few. Christ’s death can be viewed through many lenses: as payment in exchange for freedom (redemption), as the turning of enemies into friends (reconciliation), or the turning away of wrath (propitiation), and more. Each perspective on this gracious act at the center of Christianity adds to our understanding of its significance.

What’s more, even though it was written in the 1980s drawing from research done in the 1950s, many of the arguments in The Atonement, especially those found in the chapter on propitiation, are applicable to current debates about the nature of the atonement.

The Atonement is on a very short list of basic theology books I’d recommend to any believer. It’s of classic quality, but not difficult to read—and short enough for those who do a page count first and eliminate anything over 200 pages. And what’s more important than understanding what Christ accomplished for us on the cross?