Bill, listeners have been learning a lot about the atonement of Christ in recent podcast and in your work, of course.

And one of the ways that one can remember what one has learned is to apply it.

And so I'd like to take what we've been discussing regarding various views on the atonement

and what you've written in your book, Atonement and the Death of Christ,

and apply it to an article from a popular blogger called,

Did God Really Need to kill Jesus to forgive you?

Dan Foster writes for the backyard church.

He questions much of what he grew up believing.

He's kind of going through deconstruction, I think.

But it can be very interesting reading, and now he's reevaluating the atonement. And here's how he begins.

He says, quote, Christianity, I was told, could not possibly be a human invention. I remember a

youth leader in my teenage years explaining that the gospel's logic was so upside down that it

could only have come from God. His reasoning was simple, a system where people are saved by grace alone, not by effort, morality, or religious performance, was so upside down, so counterintuitive that it had to be divine.

Only God would come up with something as scandalous as unearned grace.

End of quote. I'm going to stop there for a moment, Bill. Are there arguments for the truth of

Christianity based on its unusual or counterintuitive reasoning that you know of? I mean, I know that C.S. Lewis said something like

that Christianity had that certain twist that real things have, and I just wonder that there's

something to that. Yes, I've heard arguments of that sort offered occasionally, but I have to say,

I've never found them very compelling myself. I think,

though, that they could be part of a cumulative case in connection with other arguments.

Dan continues, the youth leader's argument, quote, framed Christianity as this wildly imaginative

divine interruption in an otherwise

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