Christ’s penal substitutionary death which demands the resurrection…because the resurrection is a demonstration of the legal verdict of righteousness pronounced on the incarnate Son, the resurrection is not an event we loosely tie to a legal atonement but is itself legal in nature as it is Christ’s justification. And because salvation comes to us via our union with Christ, we can declare that he “was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.”

The good news of the gospel is that Jesus paid for all our sins on the cross and we are thereby forgiven.
Jerry Bridges wrote those words in his excellent work, The Discipline of Grace. As a pastor, I’ve recommended that book to many over the years and loaned out my personal copy so much that I’ve had to replace it repeatedly. But every time I read that line I cringe just a bit. I want to write in “and was raised from the dead!” I want his summary of the gospel to include the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. After all, Paul makes clear that Christ’s resurrection is no inconsequential matter, telling the Corinthians that “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in yours sins” (1 Cor. 15:17). The resurrection is of absolute necessity to the gospel message. But I have to admit, this is an area in which I’m a bit sensitive.
An Increasing Awareness of a Truncated “Gospel”
My sensitivity stems from two things. First, I’ve pastored the same church in a college town for the last twenty-three years. With a transient town and students moving in and out, I’ve done my fair share of membership interviews over this time. In those interviews, I always ask the prospective member to share the gospel with me. To the best of our ability, it’s our church’s way of making sure that the person is a believer and is able to articulate the basic components of the gospel message. And more often than I like to admit, the resurrection is absent in these “gospel” presentations. The follow-up question that I’ve most frequently had to ask is, “Did Jesus remain dead?” Of course, without exception, the person answers by affirming that Jesus rose from the dead on that Easter Sunday morning, but for some reason the importance and necessity of the resurrection doesn’t immediately register.
The second reason for my sensitivity in this area comes from my days in graduate studies. The focus of my work in those years was on defending penal substitutionary atonement from the attacks of so-called “evangelicals” who began to argue against this understanding of Christ’s work around the turn of the century.[1] Their attacks ranged from claims that penal substitution is a picture of child abuse to arguments that it distorts intra-Trinitarian relationships. But one attack that always seemed to surface was that proponents of penal substitution ignore the resurrection because our understanding of the cross makes it unnecessary.
For example, Tom Smail wrote in his work on the cross,
The penal model as such does not quite know what to make of the resurrection. It gives birth to a spirituality that . . . is symbolized . . . by a preaching that is dominated by a one-sided preoccupation with sin and condemnation and the suffering of Christ as the price of our deliverance from it. The resurrection is seen only as the sign of the Father’s acceptance of the sacrifice, his affirmation of the sufficiency of what has been done to secure our pardon, and as a rather disconnected promise of life after death.[2]
Clark Pinnock ratcheted up the charge, claiming that the penal “idea of the atonement does not have much room for resurrection which can go almost unmentioned because it is not required.”[3]
Upon reading those attacks, I always wanted to dismiss them as attacks on straw men. “Of course defenders of penal substitution see the necessity of the resurrection,” I wanted to respond. We would never ignore it or let it go unmentioned. But then I would remember those membership interviews.
Given a moment’s reflection, you can see why detractors of penal substitution make this claim and why proponents of this precious doctrine often do allow the resurrection to go unmentioned in their “gospel” presentations. There is a certain logic to this “gospel” message that seems sound, coherent, and complete without noting the resurrection at all. Because God is holy and we are sinful, we bear divine condemnation. But God sent his Son into the world to live in perfect obedience and then die on the cross, bearing the condemnation that we deserved in our place. Therefore, if we repent of our sins and believe in him, we are credited with his perfect righteousness, and Christ’s death counts as the complete payment for our sins and removes God’s condemnation from us.
In this description, Christ’s death seems to account for everything. The problem, of course, is that without mention of the resurrection a gospel message is no gospel at all (1 Cor. 15:4), and Scripture will not allow such an empty proclamation to be called “good news.” Again, Paul declared, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:17-18). He doesn’t say, “If Christ has not been raised, your sins remain forgiven and divine condemnation is removed, you just won’t get to experience resurrection.” Rather, he says if Christ isn’t raised, we’re still in our sins and will perish. Does this mean that Pinnock, Smail, and others are right, and it’s time to move on from penal substitution?
Of course not. To abandon penal substitution in light of its biblical support (see esp. Rom. 3:21-26; 8:3; 2 Cor. 5:21; Gal. 3:13) is no better than ignoring the resurrection. Rather, we need to understand the saving nature of the resurrection. We need to see that, far from penal substitution leaving no room for the resurrection, it is the penalty-bearing nature of Christ’s death that demands the resurrection if we are to be saved. But in order to see this, we need to understand three elements: (1) Christ as our representative substitute, (2) the condemnation involved in penal substitution, and (3) the legal nature of Christ’s resurrection. We’ll take these in turn.
Christ as Our Representative Substitute
In order to understand why penal substitution demands the resurrection, one must consider the representative nature of Jesus’s work. Some have attempted to place the concepts of representation and substitution in separate and exclusive categories,[4] but Scripture allows no such division. Believers are said to have “died with Christ” (Rom. 6:8) and are told that “Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). Christ represents believers in his high-priestly work (Heb. 5:1), and because he is our substitute, he bears divine wrath in our place and on our behalf. Thus, Jesus is a “representative substitute” for believers, as Packer noted fifty years ago.[5] This recognition must be our starting point in seeing how the cross and resurrection are necessary for our justification. The reason for this is because what Christ accomplishes in both his death and resurrection is appropriated to believers through our union with him. What is true of him becomes true of us, his people, because he is our representative.
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“Described as a ‘godfather to the [humanist] movement’ by the New York Times Magazine, Epstein was also named ‘one of the top faith and moral leaders in the United States’ by Faithful Internet, a project coordinated by the United Church of Christ with assistance from the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, for his efforts to bring together atheists, agnostics, and allies, as part of an ancient and ever-evolving ethical tradition that can be called humanism.”

The new chief chaplain at Harvard University is an atheist, the New Your Times reported.
What are the details?
Author Greg Epstein, the 44-year-old writer of “Good Without God,” is the Ivy League university’s new chaplain and will “coordinate the activities of more than 40 university chaplains who lead the Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and other religious communities on campus.”
Epstein said of his appointment, “There is a rising group of people who no longer identify with any religious tradition but still experience a real need for conversation and support around what it means to be a good human and live an ethical life.”
Epstein, who was raised in a Jewish household, has been the university’s “humanist chaplain” since 2005 and previously educated students on how to center their relationships around themselves and one another rather than with God.
Epstein says that people ought not look to God for answers because “we are each other’s answers.”
Students, according to the outlet, are mainly lauding Epstein’s appointment.
“Greg’s leadership isn’t about theology,” one student said. “It’s about cooperation between people of different faiths and bringing together people who wouldn’t normally consider themselves religious.”
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More than a decade before Newsweek declared 1976 the “Year of the Evangelicals,” the coalition of conservative Protestants had already begun to break apart…Evangelicals were engaged in a Battle for the Bible.

Few periods of the last century were more destructive, realigning, reshaping, and redefining of Evangelicalism than the decade and a half beginning in the mid-1970s. The evangelical coalition was taut and threadbare, in danger of tearing asunder by scholars who disputed a fundamental of the Christian faith, Scripture’s inerrancy. Ironically, the ripping occurred the same year that Evangelicalism unexpectedly received national acclaim linked to a presidential election.
Arising from this period were two closely correlated questions: (1) Who are the Evangelicals? (2) What do Evangelicals believe concerning the authority and truthfulness of Holy Scripture? Both questions were thrust upon Evangelicalism in 1976, the year that Newsweek deemed the “Year of the Evangelical.” In what follows, I will show that 1976, while seemingly a high water mark for Evangelicalism, actually exposed serious fractures which proved beyond repair, despite valiant efforts by leading evangelical scholars. Many who abandoned the foundational evangelical belief in the inerrancy of Scripture took the evangelical label with them and expanded it to allow for their belief in “limited inerrancy.” They published numerous essays and books challenging the long-held belief that the Bible is without error in the original manuscripts. The battle was on; would Evangelicalism survive?
1976: A Pivotal Year for God’s Word
In America’s bicentennial, Jimmy Carter ran for United States president as self-professed “born again” Southern Baptist Sunday School teacher, The incumbent, Gerald Ford, a reserved Episcopalian, professed the same. At that time, Episcopalian and Southern Baptist leaders identified their denominations as distinct if not separate from America’s evangelicals. With the presidential election only a week away, these distinctions were too intricate for Newsweek’s editors to acknowledge or comprehend when they designated 1976 the “Year of the Evangelical” (October 25, 1976). For example, Carter’s praise for Paul Tillich, a Neo-Orthodox theologian from whom evangelical scholars stood aloof, did not temper Newsweek’s equating Carter, the Southern Baptist, with Evangelicals.
Harold Lindsell, also a Southern Baptist, took a vastly different posture toward the SBC leadership than Carter, who identified with them. Lindsell published The Battle for the Bible in 1976 and by June it was already in its third printing. Formerly Lindsell was a faculty member at Northern Baptist and Fuller Seminaries and Wheaton College before he succeeded Carl F. H. Henry as editor of Christianity Today (1968–78). So, when Lindsell wrote his book he did so as the editor of a major Christian magazine, not as an academic. Thus, he appealed not to scholars but to “evangelical lay people in the pews who may not be aware of the central issue that faces them, their denominations, and their institutions.”[1] What distressed him was stated at the outset, as he regards
…biblical inerrancy to be the most important theological topic of this age. A great battle rages about it among people called evangelicals. I did not start the battle and wish it were not essential to discuss it. The only way to avoid it would be to remain silent. And silence on this matter would be a grave sin.[2]
Of his own denomination, he notes, “Probably 90 percent of the people in the pews believe in biblical infallibility.”[3] His concern is with the academic institutions: “Among faculty members of Southern Baptist colleges and seminaries where do you find articulate spokesmen who come out in favor of inerrancy? The silence is deafening!”[4] He laments that as academics “retreat from inerrancy,” denominations abandon vital ministries and displace them with “socio-political-economic concerns.”[5]
Lindsell’s principal distress was over Fuller Seminary’s revising of the doctrine of inerrancy by endorsing their own coinage, “limited inerrancy.” He also called attention to an ethical issue; Fuller Seminary administrators publicly portrayed the seminary as holding to its founding doctrinal affirmation, which included Scripture’s infallibility, even after some of its faculty “ceased to believe in an infallible Bible.”[6] They contended that Scripture’s inerrancy is restricted to matters of Christian faith and practice with allowance for errors in matters concerning the observable world, geography, history, and science.[7]
It is significant, then, that Harold J. Ockenga, first President of Fuller Seminary (1947–54) and still serving on the seminary’s board, launched the initial volley from Lindsell’s arsenal by writing the foreword. Ockenga drew attention to Fuller Seminary, sharing Lindsell’s concern that Scripture’s “inerrancy is the watershed of modern theological controversy” because “those who give up an authoritative, dependable, authentic, trustworthy, and infallible Scripture must ultimately yield the right to use of the name ‘evangelical.’”
This is Lindsell’s burden when he makes his final appeal:
It is my conviction that a host of those evangelicals who no longer hold to inerrancy are still relatively evangelical. I do not for one moment concede, however, that in a technical sense anyone can claim the evangelical badge once he has abandoned inerrancy…It is true that a man can be a Christian without believing in inerrancy. But it is also true that down the road lie serious pitfalls into which such a denial leads. And even if this generation can forego inerrancy and remain more or less evangelical, history tells us that those who come after this generation will not do so…I do not look for or expect a time in history as we know it when the whole professing church will believe either in inerrancy or the major doctrines of the Christian faith. There will always be wheat and tares growing together until the angels begin their task of reaping the harvest at the end of the age.[8]
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