Peter SmytheA Different Kind of Word Preacher

As a young boy in Texas, I was raised Roman Catholic. While growing up, I followed the crowd just about like everyone else - I made the sign of the cross when I entered the sanctuary, stood and kneeled at the proper times, and faithfully kept my peace during the Eucharistic prayers when the priest invoked the “help of the saints and all the bishops.” In my CCD classes (Sunday school for Protestants), I kept mum while people discussed wild things like purgatory, transubstantiation, the infallibility of the popes, and even just what “Christ” really meant (one of my teachers said it was a last name like “Smythe”).

Everything stayed pretty smooth until “confirmation” came around. Confirmation is a sacrament where a teenager, who has learned the tenets of the Catholic faith, “confirms” his faith in the Lord/Church (only one universal Catholic church). While I didn’t have any qualms at all with the Lord or with the Word, I couldn’t confirm what I did not see to be the truth despite the “2000 years of theology” behind it. As part of my confirmation process, I was required to write a letter to our senior priest telling him why I wanted to be confirmed. I entitled my letter, “Give Me a Good Reason Why I Should Be Confirmed.” A parent/priest/reluctant-teen meeting was quickly scheduled. As my father and I walked into the church to meet with the priest, he turned to me and said, “You’re going to get confirmed whether you like it or not.” To Dad’s chagrin, that didn’t happen. The priest, flustered by my questions about praying for the dead and indulgences, threw up his hands and agreed that I shouldn’t be confirmed. when he couldn’t scripturally answer my questions about praying for the dead and indulgences. Some months later a man asked me to leave the church when I openly questioned the Church’s excommunication of Catholic girls who had had abortions. Dad wasn’t too happy about that either.

The reasons for my exit from the Catholic Church can really be boiled down to this: an irreverent attitude to theological heroes. While even as a Catholic boy I could understand the concept that the Bible has to be rightly interpreted or “rightly divided,” being enslaved to the lens of theological elitists who “understood” the Word was too much for me. I didn’t care to idolize some dead theologian because some other dead (or live) theologian idolized him. Either God was able to explain the Plan of Redemption to me in plain English (I later found out that it was plain Greek) or I’d just claim stupidity on the Day of Judgment (you might think I’m kidding, but I’m not).

One of the main aims of this blog is to cause you to confront the Bible text yourself without a theological hero waiting in the wings. What exactly does the Word say? Is that little truism used by that heavyweight preacher really true or is it weighted with some theological gloss or worse?

As we head further in this series, we’re going to run into some of that theological hero gloss. While I plan to get into 2 Corinthians 5.21 later on, here’s a taste of where I’m coming from.

He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. (2 Corinthians 5.21, NASB)

This verse, even in the Greek, is straightforward and direct until the heroes grab hold of it:

These Levitical concepts of substitution and imputation are the background of 2 Cor. 5.21. Jesus did not literally become sin; sin was symbolically imputed to him. The Scriptures clearly teach that Jesus’ sacrifice was a fit substitutionary offering because it was a sinless offering… . The doctrine of Identification contradicts the fact that Christ “offered himself without blemish to God” and that as a sin offering, he was “most holy to the Lord.” (D.R. McConnell, A Different Gospel at 125-26)

Paul writes as one well-versed in the Hebrew Bible, in which the same word does duty for “sin” and “sin-offering”. He may have Isaiah 53.10 in mind (cf. Romans 8.3). (F.F. Bruce, An Expanded Paraphrase of the Epistles of Paul at 137 n. 2)

There are others who want to go the opposite direction, and tone down the expression Paul is using. They point out that in the Hebrew language, the same word is used for “sin” and “sin offering.” So, they say, maybe Paul was employing a Hebraism. Perhaps the verse ought to be translated this way: “He hath made him to be [a sin offering] for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” Now, that might seem to make sense and do away with the offensiveness of the expression. And the statement itself would be true enough: Christ became a sin offering. But that’s not what Paul means here, and you can’t sustain that interpretation linguistically, grammatically, or contextually.

“Made Him to be a sin offering”? Why Not? In the first place, the Greek word translated “sin” in this text is hamartia, and it means “sin.” It is never used in the New Testament to speak of a sin offering. In the second place, the same word (hamartia) is used twice in the Greek text of our verse. It’s used in such a way that the sense of the term must mean the same thing both places. It would make utter nonsense of the verse to render it this way: “He hath made him to be a sin offering for us, who knew no sin offering.” In the third place, the word sin obviously stands in deliberate contrast with the word righteousness (“he hath made him to be sin … that we might be made … righteousness”)—and if the word is made to mean “sin offering,” it destroys the parallelism of that contrast. (Phil Johnson, Pyromaniacs Blog at http://teampyro.blogspot.com/2006/08/back-to-2-corinthians-521.html)

D.R. McConnell, in entitling his book, A Different Gospel, labeled those who read 2 Corinthians 5.21 literally heretical false teachers. 2 Corinthians 5.21 he said, instead, speaks of Jesus being a “sin offering.” F.F. Bruce, an eminent Greek and Hebrew scholar, agrees with him in his Expanded Paraphrase. Phil Johnson, wildly popular Pyromaniacs blogger and all-around false doctrine detective, on the other hand, says that McConnell’s and F.F. Bruce’s “clear scriptural teaching” just can’t be the case “linguistically, grammatically, or contextually.”

But with Johnson, we see he’s got his own gloss on 2 Corinthians 5.21 - the God-breathed words really don’t mean what they say:

Commenter: Regarding the imputation of righteousness, we know Christ’s righteousness remains His righteousness and is only credited to us. We have no righteousness of our own either before or after salvation. In the same way, can we say that our sins are credited to Him but remain ours? Not in the sense that we will have to pay for them - He has done that - but in that we are the source or origin of those sins that were imputed to Him. He had no sin before the Sacrifice and He has none afterwards. Imputation does not mean possession, as you know: it means we are declared righteous and not made righteous. So can we say that Christ was declared sin (forensically) but not made sin (actually)? Is this intrinsic or inherent in theological imputation? Just wondering out loud . . .

Phil Johnson responds: Mike: “So can we say that Christ was declared sin (forensically) but not made sin (actually)? Is this intrinsic or inherent in theological imputation?” Of course. But I don’t think there’s any reason to make a separate category of “theological imputation.” Forensic reckoning was part of everyday life in Paul’s time, just as it is today. (Phil Johnson, Pyromaniacs Blog at http://teampyro.blogspot.com/2006/08/back-to-2-corinthians-521.html)

While the verse says “He became sin” that we might be “become righteous” in Him, in Phil’s world none of that actually happens. Christ was made sin, but He really wasn’t. We were made righteous, but we really weren’t. Everything is just imputed even though that’s not in the verse anywhere.

When you stand before Jesus Christ on the Day of Judgment, just which one of these guys would you choose to stand in for you?

[Note: In light of Phil’s comments, just what are we supposed to do with McConnell’s false teachers?]