You're listening to Unbelievable with Justin Browley.

Hello and welcome to the final classic replay of 2022 as 2023 beckons soon.

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The link is with today's podcast and on today's classic replay we're talking about the cross Christians believe that Jesus is death and the cross provided the atonement for our sins but in what way well advocates of the penal substitution review hold that God punished the sun instead of us others argue that's an unjust way of viewing the crucifixion and prefer the Christus victor view that Jesus defeats the powers of evil on the cross.

Well in this replay Steve Jeffery defended penal substitution while Alan Mollon you questioned it we also had contributions from American theologian and church leader Greg Boyd in defense of the Christus victim model and UK leader Dave Bish in defense of penal substitution re atonement I hope you enjoy today's classic replay thanks for being with us.

Today on the program we're asking what happened on the cross Steve Jeffrey is the pastor of Emmanuel evangelical church in North London and his book pierced for our transgressions was a defense of the centrality of what's called penal substitution as a view of the atonement well I'm also joined in the studio today by Alan Mollon you who's the leader of air valley community church in West Yorkshire.

He's writing about the issue of atonement in his current book evangelical morphodoxy will find out exactly what that means in a moment's time but he would say that the Christus victor approach should be the central understanding of what the atonement is so we're going to be looking at the question of what exactly happened on the cross what does it mean to say that Jesus died for our sins and we're going to be looking at some of the controversies that have been going on in this area in recent years so a very well welcome to both my guests both Alan Mollon and I hope you enjoyed the video.

Yes both Alan and Steve thank you for joining me.

Great to be here. You're welcome. Thank you very much for being with me perhaps Steve as someone who's been with us before you'd like to kick us off you were here about this time last year talking about different views on hell.

That's right. Yeah.

This is obviously another area where Christians come to different conclusions sometimes on on the nature of the atonement nature of the cross.

Tell us a little bit though about how you got into actually writing a book on this very subject.

Well you're right this is one of those areas where Christians have different views about what Jesus was doing in his death on the cross.

To my mind the Bible says that Jesus was doing a whole range of different things. He is our victor victor. He's the one who conquers for us.

He is our ransom. He is our substitute. He suffered the punishment due to us for our sins. He's our example and so on.

Now the problem comes when people miss one of those perspectives or they deny one of those perspectives and it seemed to me and a number of other people that my two co authors of the book.

Andrew Satch and Mike Ovi that that's what some people were doing. Some people were denying a biblical perspective on the cross of Jesus Christ the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement.

And so that's why we wrote the book to try and set the record straight and try and give people some of the biblical and theological material to deal with.

This came particularly out in the light of Steve Chalk this was several years ago.

The first time Steve Chalk was being controversial when he said that well it was really just a short segment in a book he didn't call the lost message of Jesus with Alan Mann.

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