Book Review: Pierced for Our Transgressions

Earlier this week, Keith asked me, "what's the best book you've read on your sabbatical, so far?"

I offered several different titles that I enjoyed, but none stood out as "the best." Now I have a title for him.

Not only is Pierced for Our Transgressions the best book I've read on sabbatical, but it's the best book I've read in a year. Maybe more. It may be on the top ten of most important books I've ever read. It's that good. And it's that important.

When I was in seminary, and then the first few years after seminary, questioning the truth of the penal substitutionary work of Christ just didn't exist (at least not widely and openly). Today the attacks on the cross are widely embraced. So statements like the following (from the worst book — Proclaiming the Scandal of the Cross — I've read so far) are considered acceptable:

"It will not do, therefore, to characterize the atonement as God's punishment falling on Christ…or as Christ's appeasement or persuasion of God."

"…ethically, this model [penal substitution] has little to offer.…In the end, a penal satisfaction presentation of the atonement can too easily lead to a situation in which we might conclude that Jesus came to save us from God."

"…[the] penal satisfaction theory…has significant problems and does not cohere well with biblical teaching on salvation."

The misunderstanding of the meaning of penal substitution — that through His death, Christ bore our sin, pain and death, enduring and satisfying the wrath of God in our place — is evidenced throughout the various contributors to Proclaiming the Scandal. And the great value of Pierced for Our Transgressions is that it provides a clear Biblical and theological corrective.

After providing a brief overview of the opposition to penal substitution (and something of its genesis and history), the authors provide a lengthy discussion of many Biblical passages that not only support penal substitution, but explicitly teach it. They consider passages like Exodus 12, Leviticus 16, Isaiah 53, the Gospels, Romans, and Galatians 3. The Biblical weight of evidence is great, and the 70 pages of careful exposition of numerous passages makes that abundantly clear. Then, the authors offer 50 pages in which they demonstrate how penal substitution not only fits within a Biblical framework of theology, but how penal substitution alone provides a Biblical and theological reason for the death of Christ. And they follow that with both the positive implications of penal substitution, and a historical overview of this understanding of Christ's death, demonstrating that this has always been the dominant view concerning Christ's death, and not some relatively new theory, as books like Scandal suggest.

This first half of Piercing is weighty and helpful for creating a Biblical framework for understanding Christ's death. In the last 130 pages or so, the authors then do the difficult work of answering the myriad objections to this view. Its difficulty arises not from the trouble of answering the questions — most of them are adequately precluded and answered in the first 200 pages — but from the task of accumulating and reading all the dissensions to penal substitution. So these authors have graciously provided the church for years to to come a great gift of addressing all the various objections (the consider 26 different, specific denials of substitution) in a systematic, Biblical and clear manner.

This book addresses a complex and important issue to the church. It provides sound Biblical exposition of important passages, articulates involved theological issues, and answers complex objections — and does all these things very clearly and concisely. It may not be a book that I will ever read from cover to cover again, but it is a book that I will often recommend and will often use as a reference as I meditate on the greatness of our Savior's work on the cross.