Tag Archives: Stephen De Young

February 7, 2025

What is the “Baptism for the Dead” in 1 Corinthians 15:29?

By Clarke Morledge

This might be near the top of the list of the most confusing Bible passages. In 1 Corinthians 15:29, what is Paul talking about when mentioning people being baptized for the dead?

When was the last time you heard a sermon about this? I am not a gambling person, but if I was I would wager to say, “NEVER.”

Hip-hop artist Lecrae was “rebaptized” in the River Jordan, in September, 2019…. Baptism is a central feature of the Christian faith. But what do we make of Paul’s mention of “baptism for the dead” in 1 Corinthians 15? That is a real puzzler.

 

A lot of Bible scholars scratch their heads on this one. I have heard that there are about forty different interpretations about this verse. Here is a quick look at one of those interpretations.

Think genealogy.

My mother spent a number of years researching the genealogical records for our family. Anyone who has labored in genealogical research knows that one of the best sources of information is found with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly known as the Mormons. They interpret 1 Corinthians 15:29 as saying that a Mormon could undergo a kind of “proxy baptism” on behalf of dead people, normally family members.  In order to do that, you need to have good records to identify deceased members of your family tree. LDS genealogical resources are therefore available for converts to Mormonism who want to undergo a proxy baptism for deceased family members, going generations back, as a means of making sure that there is a place in God’s Heaven for them, according to that theology.

My mom never bought into that LDS theology, but Joseph Smith certainly did and taught it to his fellow Mormons.

Most scholars today put the Mormon interpretation down towards the very bottom of the list of being the most legitimate way of understanding this text. So, if Joseph Smith missed it, what is the right way to interpret 1 Corinthians 15:29? The verse reads in the ESV translation:

Otherwise, what do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf?

 

Context for “Baptism for the Dead” in 1 Corinthians 15

Some context does help immensely here. In the 1 Corinthians 15 chapter as a whole, Paul is writing to certain Corinthian believers who have some serious doubts about the bodily resurrection of believers in Christ when the Lord Jesus comes back at his final return, to set the world right. Paul is aware of this practice of some Christians being baptized on behalf of those who have already died. He is not making a judgment on the practice in verse 29, right or wrong. But he is using the practice as an illustration to correct this theological error about the resurrection among the Corinthians.

In other words, what is the point of being baptized on behalf of the dead, if there is no future resurrection? If there is no future resurrection, then the practice of “baptism for the dead” does not make sense.

Here is the main takeaway of the passage: There is going to be a future resurrection of believers!!

Parsing Out the Best Interpretation of 1 Corinthians 15:29

Still, what is this “baptism for the dead” all about, anyway?

Without going off on some endless rabbit trail, some have suggested that this “baptism for the dead” was actually a pagan practice, possibly connected with the Greco-Roman mystery religions.  However, most scholars take the view advanced by the late and eminent Gordon Fee that there is no real evidence to support this idea. Some of these ancient mystery cults had rites for water purification, but they did not have the same importance and meaning that the early Christians had regarding baptism. For Fee, this “baptism for the dead” was an infrequent practice, but it was nevertheless performed by some early Christians (Fee, NICNT Commentary on First Corinthians, first edition, p. 764).

The late Old Testament scholar, Michael Heiser, has a very illuminating podcast episode covering the controversy about this verse, which I would highly recommend. Heiser notes a number of questions that scholars raise about this passage:

  • Is this passage talking about water baptism or some metaphorical understanding of baptism?
  • Why are these people undergoing this baptism? Is it a form of penance for the Purgatorial relief of the dead? In other words, was Joseph Smith onto something?
  • Is the phrase “baptized on behalf of the dead” really just a reference to a ritual washing of dead bodies, not having anything to do with baptism as we normally think of it?

Interestingly, Eastern Orthodox priest Stephen De Young, author of The Religion of the Apostles: Orthodox Christianity in the First Century, takes a very similar approach that Michael Heiser does. One particular observation, rooted more in the original Greek text of the letter, which tends to be obscured in many English translations, is that “the dead” spoken here in this verse are actually deceased Christians. Paul had been going around preaching the Gospel across the Roman Empire, and some believers had already died before Jesus’ return.

In the New Testament era, it was quite common for Christians to believe that Jesus would be returning within the lifetime of the apostles, and of those who had become Christians in that same generation. Christians back in the first century might never have imagined that the timing of the Second Coming might be delayed by at least around 2,000 years! So, what about those believers who had died in that first generation before the return of Jesus?

Was it because those dead believers were possibly not baptized, suggesting that a form of “proxy baptism” was practiced? Well, this is highly unlikely as the normative practice in that era of the early church was to baptize people immediately after conversion. It was not until some time had passed, and more pagan-background people were coming to have faith in Christ, that it became necessary to delay baptism, in order that these new believers had sufficient enough instruction to undergo baptism, to make sure that these new Christians knew more about what they were getting themselves into! By the third or fourth century or so, when more and more people without much background knowledge of the Bible were coming into the church, the typical delay for baptism after conversion could have been up to THREE YEARS! (See J. I. Packer’s Grounded in the Gospel).

Most probably these deceased believers were already baptized before they died. We can reasonably infer that some kind of “proxy baptism” was not in view here. So if  indeed “proxy baptism” is off the table, what is really going on here?

A careful look at the text again in various translations helps: The KJV takes a very word-for-word approach with the idea that these living Christians were being “baptized for the dead.” But translations like the ESV take an extra step more aligned with more thought-for-thought translations: “baptized on behalf of the dead.” The same Greek word translated word-for-word as “for” is translated in much the same way in the ESV of Philemon 1:13,”I would have been glad to keep him with me, in order that he might serve me on your behalf during my imprisonment for the gospel.” Acts 9:16 is similar, as is 2 Corinthians 1:6.

In 1 Corinthians 15:29, this idea of being “baptised for the dead” can be translated in four possible ways:

  • Baptised vicariously in the place of the dead, or just baptized in place of the dead. But this interpretive translation can be ruled out since Jesus already vicariously died in place of the dead believers with his own death. No one else would have to die to benefit those already dead, since Jesus already took care of that.
  • Baptised for the benefit of the dead. Again, what is the benefit for the dead person or persons? There is no known reason to explain this. So, we can rule this out as well.
  • Baptised for the sake of the dead. This is much better. It suggests that there is some goal in mind. However, that goal is not terribly clear in this passage, so we should be cautious here.
  • Baptised in honor of the dead. Heiser agrees that this is the best option available. There is no benefit for the person or persons who have already died. If there is a benefit, it is more an honorific benefit. A good example of this is when someone you know dies, and the family asks that any gifts for the survivors be given to a charity that the deceased person really likes; like an animal shelter or a medicine-based charity; such as, fighting to end cancer. You honor the dead person by providing some type of benefit to that charity.

So, which translation is best? Of the four possible translations, this last interpretation ties in best with the context of 1 Corinthians 15 as a whole. Remember that Paul mentions that some 500 people witnessed the bodily resurrection of Jesus. But by the time Paul was ministering in Corinth, there was a good chance that a number of these 500 witnesses might have already died, and not been given the opportunity to witness the Second Coming of Jesus within their earthly lifetimes. Therefore, there were some new Christians in Corinth who decided to get baptized, partly as a way of honoring those believers who had already died, as well as themselves also receiving the benefits of baptism, thus marking ones’ entry into the Christian community.

 

 

The Religion of the Apostles, by Stephen De Young, shows how the beliefs and practices of the early church connect with the world of Second Temple Judaism, the historical context for Jesus of Nazareth and the New Testament. One of the oddest practices among some, though clearly not all, early Christians is the rite of baptism for the dead, giving honor to believers who have already died. See the four part Veracity review of De Young’s book for more.

 

Christians Being Baptized in Honor of Other Dead Believers in the Early Church

Stephen De Young, in The Religion of the Apostles, agrees with this honorific interpretation of 1 Corinthians 15:29, noting that there was an ancient practice among the early Christians to do exactly this; that is, to be baptized in a way that gave honor to those believers who had already died. De Young says that these early Christians were doing this, but they were not explicitly making reference to this passage of 1 Corinthians 15:29 to support this practice (De Young, p. 162).

De Young also notes that the act of baptism is passive. It is not “those who baptize for the dead,” but rather “those who are baptized for the dead” (De Young, p. 162).

This interpretation proposed by both Stephen De Young and Michael Heiser is the most convincing to me, as has the least amount of problems with it as compared to alternative views, though every time I think about it, I still scratch my head a bit.  Stephen De Young suggests that this odd passage explains why the practice of saint veneration took off even in the era of the early church, building on the “baptism for the dead” ritual. The practice continues today in many Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox circles. Because of the Protestant Reformation’s rejection of saint veneration , particularly with respect to icon veneration, (many Protestants call it an accretion), this practice died off within at least the last 500 years, in most of Protestant Western Christianity.

Should Christians still practice “baptism for the dead?” Paul himself refers to the practice in the third person (see the Christian Standard Bible translation of this verse, which uses the pronoun “they”), and neither as a practice he himself advocates nor practices (no “I” or “we”). Since Paul makes only passing reference to the practice, neither approving or disproving it, it can simply be regarded as a custom and not a command of Scripture. We should honor the lives of Christians who have died, but the Bible does not dictate any specific way to do this which transcends culture.

But at least this interpretation helps to make better sense of a very, very puzzling passage of Scripture.

Sponsored by the Christian Standard Bible, theologians Brandon Smith and Trevin Wax have a 15-minute podcast episode covering this passage.

The folks at Logos Bible Software feature an interview with scholar B. J. Oropeza about the difficulties in interpreting this passage:

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December 30, 2024

2024 Year in Review

By Clarke Morledge

Here are some highlights from the Veracity blog for 2024, as the year winds down to a close…..

But before I jump into that, here is a quick meditation on why Veracity exists. Veracity is all about learning, knowing, and defending what the truth is. Sadly, we live in a world where truth gets set off to the side. Sometimes, even those of us with the best of intentions get sidetracked and mislead by those who live by lies.

Here is a recent example. One of biggest news stories of 2024 has been the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. Veteran news reporter, Clarissa Ward, was in Syria investigating some of the prisons ran by the former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. In one of the cells Ms. Ward went into with her guide, they found a man saying that he had been in the prison several months. It was a griping scene. Ward offered the man some water, and some food, before he eventually boarded an ambulance. It was horrifying to witness the state of this man who had been imprisoned by al-Assad…… or so it seemed.

A few days after this stunning report, it became known that the story about this man was a hoax. Apparently, Clarissa Ward and her camera team had been duped. This man whom they “rescued” from this prison cell was none other than Salama Mohammad Salama, a first lieutenant in the Syrian Air Force Intelligence, one of al-Assad’s cronies who himself had a record of torturing opponents of al-Assad.

I have to admit, when I first heard and saw the story, I bought into it hook, line, and sinker. On the surface, the story sounded convincing. My heartstrings were pulled, as I sympathized with the man’s plight, narrated by a stunned veteran journalist. But it did seem odd that the man went off with the ambulance without giving Clarissa Ward a phone number to call someone in his family, to tell them he was free from the prison. Clarissa Ward had been duped. CNN had been duped. I had been duped.

It is a terrible feeling to know that you have been lied to. Unfortunately, too often well-meaning Christians will get duped by misinformation about their faith. There are plenty of critics of Christianity who see right through the misinformation that gets propagated in certain Christian circles. Some of this misinformation comes in the form of rather benign Christian urban legends, or genuine conversations of disagreement regarding topics where we have incomplete data to work with. However, other pieces of misinformation can be highly damaging, triggering sentiments of mistrust towards Christian spokespersons or other Christians more generally. If those lies do not get exposed by Christians willing to think deeper about their faith, then it only increases the cynicism of the skeptic and prompts unprepared Christians to go through a process of faith deconstruction, which in some cases can lead to outright deconversion.

Veracity exists to expose those lies and get at the truth of what makes Christianity true. Hopefully, if you have been reading the Veracity blog for awhile, you have been helped at least somewhat to ask curious questions which might lead to a deeper and more genuine commitment to know and love Jesus Christ. Thanks for sticking around and reading.

Reflections on the Year 2024

I lost some good friends this year, as friends get older. These were men who walked humbly with God, and it showed in their lives.

More in the public eye, there are those who are still with us, but who are living in times of twilight. D. A. Carson, one of founders of the Gospel Coalition and one of the finest exegetical theologians living today has withdrawn from speaking due to his Parkinson’s disease. Richard B. Hays, a veteran New Testament American theologian, who recently co-wrote a very controversial book with his son, a controversy covered here on Veracityer, has gone into hospice care.

Yet there are others in the greater public eye who have died, and a few of their stories are worth noting, but for different reasons.

Before there was Nicholas Cage in the Left Behind movie, there was Hal Lindsey, the great popularizer of EndTimes scenarious based on a dispensationlist interpretation of the Book of Revelation.

 

The Late Great Hal Lindsey

In late November, I learned of the death of Hal Lindsey, the author of the 1970’s blockbuster book, The Late Great Planet Earth. That book was the best selling book in America in that whole decade, behind the Bible. Lindsey was a popular Christian speaker among college student audiences, particularly through Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as CRU). An extended family member of mine was convinced in reading that book that Jesus would return sometime in the 1980’s, probably by 1988, some 40 years after the founding of the modern national state of Israel 1948. Some famous Christians still think that Jesus will return before everyone living in 1948 dies, based on their interpretation of the Bible, and tweaking Hal Lindsey’s timeline.

Jesus could still return at any time, but I am not waiting to hold my breath that the year 1948 holds the definitive key to unlocking this biblical prophecy.

Lindsey was a bit fuzzy about the exact date of Christ’s return, but the conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union had many concerned. Back then, the threat of the Cold War and the USSR had me thinking that Lindsey might be right. Maybe??? I was not a geeky student of the Bible then, yet I had Christian friends whom I respected who were enamored with Lindsey’s book. But the fall of the Soviet Union by 1989 pretty much dissolved Lindsey’s reputation.

Not only did Lindsey miss the target on the date of Christ’s return, he also had questionable personal integrity with respect to marriage, being married four times going through several divorces.

Even within the last decade or so, back in the days before the iPhone and when watching television was still a thing, Lindsey was prominent on late-night cable TV, offering his analysis of world events that might impact the future. The Left Behind series of novels and movies owe a tremendous debt to Hal Lindsey. Mmmph.

Perhaps the larger scope of Lindsey’s Bible interpretive method, what theologians call “dispensationalism,” might prove to be correct in the long run, but the date-setting proclivities embedded in The Late Great Planet Earth have proven to fall woefully short in retrospect. With all due respect, I would argue that there is a better way to read the Bible concerning the “End Times.” For a similar approach, British theologian Ian Paul offers his perspective.

Frankly, I am glad I have never bothered with late-night cable TV. I was not missing much!

“Red Letter” Christianity??

Then there was the death of evangelist Tony Campolo. Years ago I read his Partly Right: Learning from the Critics of Christianity. Campolo helped many to listen to non-believers with a sympathetic ear, a virtue which I hopefully have tried to learn from, and emulate in Veracity blog posts.

About 35 years ago, I attended a Christian youth conference in Pittsburgh where Campolo was headlined as the primary speaker. Afterwards a couple of friends and I were tasked to take Campolo back to the airport to catch a flight back to his home in Philadelphia, where he was a professor at Eastern University. He was a great conversationalist, with an amazing knack for helping others to think outside of the box. Campolo impressed me as a radical Christian, which was cool. Below is one of my favorite Tony Campolo sermons:

Over the decades, this quality also made him controversial. He kept pushing boundaries. He was the spiritual advisor to President Bill Clinton during the 1990s, through the period of Clinton’s sexuality scandal. Though pro-life with respect to abortion, he was otherwise very involved in progressive politics. At one point, he refused to identify himself as an “evangelical,” as in his view, the term had become hopelessly hijacked with its connection to right-wing politics.

But he kept pushing boundaries further than necessary. He became edgy in ways I ultimately could not endorse, popularizing the concept of a “Red-Letter Christian,” elevating the words of Jesus above other teachings in Scripture. As I have shown before (see the following hyperlinks), this hermeneutic is really an example of wishful thinking that fashions the ministry of the earthly Jesus into something that reflects the embedded cultural values of the Bible reader and not what is actually in the text of Scripture.  In this way of thinking, the words/teachings of Jesus are prioritized over other teachings in the Bible, particularly the letters of Paul.

Contrary to the claim made by certain skeptical scholars that the New Testament is an inherently contradictory mish-mash of attitudes towards the Law of Moses, and ethics in general, the way the New Testament actually works is a really good example of progressive revelation in action. Progressive revelation demonstrates that God reveals truth in the Bible over time, later revelatory teachings built on top of and refining earlier teachings. For example, the New Testament itself completes the message that unfolds over centuries of Old Testament texts and teachings.

Jesus is not the only one speaking in the New Testament, for he also uses the words of Paul, but that only comes out over time. For example, Jesus’ earthly ministry was focused primarily on the Jews living in and around Jerusalem and Galilee, despite a few forays into Samaritan territory and contact with “God-fearing” Romans. In the “red letters,” Jesus tells us that he only came for the lost sheep of Israel (Matthew 15:24). It is not until AFTER the ascension of Jesus that the Gospel’s progress extends in full force to go outside of Israel and impact the whole world. Paul, who knew nothing of the earthly Jesus, received his commission on the road to Damascus by the Risen Jesus to be the Apostle to the Gentiles.

In other words, the full inclusive message of the Gospel is articulated by Jesus through the words of the Apostle Paul, not through the actual “red letters” of Jesus alone. If you are looking for an antidote to xenophobia, you need to look more to the words of Paul and not the words of the earthly Jesus in comparison. This is NOT to say that Jesus was xenophobic. Of course not. But it is to say that the Gospel’s message of welcoming and embracing those who are different from ourselves comes out more clearly through Paul, as the message of progressive revelation expands out through the pages of the entire New Testament.

The Christian faith today would look a whole lot different if Jesus had not tapped Paul to be his prime emissary to the Gentile world. Otherwise, Christianity would probably only remain a smaller sect within Judaism, and not the worldwide, universal faith of billions today.

The New Testament does not offer a full throated attack against slavery, but you do get at least a modest, indirect attack against the institution of slavery in the teachings of Paul. In comparison, the “red letters” of Jesus in the Gospels never challenge the institution of slavery, even in any indirect way. If all we had were the “red letters”of Jesus to go on, we would have never had a Christian abolitionist movement to end slavery in the United State. Think about that.

If you looking for a message of non-violence in the New Testament, and you are willing to lay aside the whole concept of judgment coming at the end of time momentarily, the words of Paul help you out better than the “red letters” of Jesus. For while the “red letters” of Jesus in the Gospels do promote non-violence, the “red letters” of Jesus in the Book of Revelation tell a very different story. In Revelation, we have Jesus going around wielding a sword and not afraid to use it. Even if you take Jesus’ words in Revelation more non-metaphorically (a wise thing to do), Jesus’ words are still more harsh than anything we find in Paul. In comparison, Paul never says an explicit word about endorsing the use of violence. Think about that one, too, for a moment.

Then finally, when it comes to the doctrine of hell, even if you leave the Book of Revelation out of the picture, Jesus talks about hell, or images related to hell, more in his “red letters” than what we find in the words of Paul. Paul never even mentions any word corresponding to “hell” once in his letters, and he only talks about “eternal destruction” in one verse, 2 Thessalonians 1:9. The differences are real, if we only take the time to actually read the New Testament.

The theological trajectory that Tony Campolo took has grieved me.

“Red Letter” Christianity sounds great on the surface, until you actually start to read the “red letters” of Jesus in comparison to other texts in the Bible. At the risk of some overstatement, in Campolo’s way of wishful thinking he wanted to equate the words of Jesus, written in red in some Bibles, with social justice efforts. Much of this was all  well-intended, as I have seen it. But it seemed to also follow in a murky way and track along with what Elon Musk has called a secular “woke mind virus,” whereby everything in reality is measured through the lens of an oppressor/oppressed matrix, viewing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision of a “color-blind” society as a deficiency and not a goal for real social change. Campolo even flipped his position on homosexuality, eventually embracing same-sex marriage as a viable Christian option.

His son, Bart Campolo, went even further, going through a period of deconstruction of his own faith, ultimately deconverting and renouncing Christian faith altogether, becoming a “humanist” chaplain. In my view, Bart took his father’s theological trajectory to its logical conclusion. I commend Bart’s honesty, though I can not follow that path either.

A contrarian in many ways, Tony Campolo nevertheless set a very good example in encouraging conservative Christians to fight against racism and ending poverty, and not getting caught up in fantasies about “Christian Nationalism.” Despite many of the positive contributions like this he made, Tony Campolo regretfully drifted away from historic orthodoxy, in a way that is not theologically sustainable over the long run across the generations (as evident with his son, Bart), but he did not drift far enough to ultimately escape God’s grace, at least in my estimation.

Another Dietrich Bonhoeffer Movie

On a somewhat related note, my wife and I and some friends did get a chance to see the new Bonhoeffer movie, over the Thanksgiving weekend.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer grew up in the world of German theological liberalism in the early 20th century, but then embraced a vision of neo-orthodoxy, a broad counter-movement to liberalism, a kind of theological half-brother to evangelicalism, that sought to restore the faith, particularly as a response to the widespread embrace of Hitler’s Nazism, which entered the void left by German theological liberalism.

Having read a few biographies about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, it was slightly painful to see how the film mangled some of the chronology of Bonhoeffer’s life. For example, Bonhoeffer confusingly placed Dietrich’s last trip to New York sometime presumably after Hitler’s invasion to Poland, after Dietrich had joined the Abwehr , the German military intelligence unit. The more historically accurate chronology has Dietrich going to New York for the last time in the early summer of 1939, realizing that he had made a mistake in going to America, and then returning to Germany to face his fate. Within a few months of his return to Germany, he then joins the Abwehr, in a subversive effort to bring down Hitler from the inside.  Hitler invades Poland that September.

But the film did highlight the key moments of the German theologian’s overall career, who died at the hand of the Nazis, after being implicated in a conspiracy that failed to assassinate Hitler. What more can you try to squeeze into a 2-hour movie? Bonhoeffer’s Christian courage is both inspiring and controversial, and the legacy of this pacifist-turned-political-traitor will continue to be examined and re-examined for some time to come.

What I found fascinating are the reviews that go all over the map regarding the kind of impression the Bonhoeffer movie was trying to make. For example, on one side, Slate magazine says “In an age of rampant access to information but elusive truth, we are all searching for quick ways to categorize one another, and to claim the best heroes for our own personal camps. Such is also the case with Bonhoeffer, whose most popular biography was written not by a German theologian, but by American conservative radio host and prominent Trump supporter Eric Metaxas….. The movie is, then, yet another claim conservatives are making to Bonhoeffer’s legacy.”

On the other side, America: The Jesuit Review, took a completely different slant, suggesting that the film is actually a prophetic warning issued against Christian conservatives: “What separates “Bonhoeffer” from the myriad instructive Holocaust biographies and melodramas is its timing: American audiences have never before watched a movie about World War II-era Germany with the knowledge that a majority of their own electorate has voted in favor of fascism….Will Evangelical America be apologizing in five years?”

I guess that is partly why I liked the film, and would recommend others see it, even with the strained and confusing chronology. When viewers on opposite sides of their ideological biases have quite contradictory takes on the same film, it generally indicates that the film at least got something right. The truth is probably somewhere in the balance between two extremes.

On my “to-be-read” list is Charles Marsh’s biography of Bonhoeffer, Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Most people that I know who have read the Marsh book tell me that it is better than Eric Metaxas’ biography of Bonhoeffer.

 

The Book of the Year… Books and More Books

My book of year, hands down, is Michael Licona’s Jesus Contradicted.  More than any other book I have read in a long time, Licona’s work to reframe how we think about the inspiration of the Scripture, in view of the evidence, and see how the impact of Greco-Roman genres of literature helps us to make better sense of the differences/discrepancies we read in the Gospels. While I do not think Licona’s call for an updated revision of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy will gain much traction, I do think Licona’s flexible view of biblical inerrancy is the most defensible way to think about the reliability of the Bible.

We do not need to try to torture the Bible to make it say what we want it to say. God gave us the Bible the way we have it, so we simply need to trust that God knows exactly what he has done and what he continues to do (BONUS: here is a link to a video interview by a Roman Catholic scholar about the late Pope Benedict that says pretty much the same thing).

Jesus, Contradicted: Why The Gospels Tell The Same Story Differently, by Michael Licona, offers a more evidenced-based approach to handling differences in the Gospels, without resorting to tortured harmonization efforts.

 

My number two book of the year is the timely The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt, showing how social media has hijacked the mental health of a generation of children and other young people. The book is making an impact, and I encourage everyone to go read it…. like right now!!

In many ways, our culture has gone crazy with an “anything goes” attitude towards social media while punishing parents who allow their kids physical freedom to go out and explore the world on their own. This is insane.

The good news is that the message of this book is not only making in-roads into the church (though perhaps not enough), it is starting to have in impact in the wider culture. In late November, 2024, Australia took the bold and audacious move of banning social media for people under the age of 16. I am not sure how enforceable such a law could be, but it is a step in the right direction as it will hopefully stir up families to take a closer look at how children digest and consume social media.

So while Haidt’s book is not the number one book I read in 2024, it certainly is the most timely and important!

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt

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Odds-n-Ends

The other most profound theological book I read in 2024 was Matthew Thiessen’s A Jewish Paul.  I am not clear on what Thiessen’s exact theological commitments are, but in this book he explains Paul’s teaching about the “spirit,” in terms of “Pneumatic Gene Therapy,”  as an explanation which makes sense of what Paul had in mind regarding the dynamics of living the Christian life, as well as thinking about the future bodily resurrection of believers.

Following up on A Jewish Paul, I read and reviewed Kent Yinger’s The New Perspective on Paul, a very, very helpful and accessible introduction a topic that at least in some circles is very controversial. Read the review, or better yet, get a copy of the book to make sense of what the fuss is all about.

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A couple of years ago, I decided to try to read at least one Bart Ehrman book a year, and offer a review. Ehrman is probably the world’s leading academic critic of evangelical Christianity, having a very loyal following of formerly evangelical Christians who have deconverted from Christianity, or otherwise deconstructed their faith in a more progressive direction. Ehrman’s podcast on YouTube has 180 thousand subscribers, so he is hard to miss.

Most Christians I know either do not know who Bart Ehrman is, which is odd, as he is probably the 21st century equivalent to Bertrand Russell, or the biblical scholar equivalent to the scientist Richard Dawkins. Or they just ignore Ehrman. I think that is a mistake. Faith deconstruction is fueled by social media these days, and Bart Ehrman stands at the head end driving a lot of it.

A lot of Christians think of Ehrman as “demon spawn,” or something like that. The problem is that Ehrman is actually an impressive, and in many ways, a winsome communicator and teacher, as evidenced by his podcasts. He considers the evidence carefully. He is a very engaging writer, too.

The problem with Ehrman ultimately, however, is one of method. The most formidable skeptics, like Ehrman, tend to think of themselves as “scholars” as opposed to being “apologists.” In this sense, “scholars” are those who do not descend to the level of apologetics. However, this is just a bunch of hogwash. Everyone is an apologist for whatever beliefs they have. Everyone has their biases, including Bart Ehrman, as well as Christians. Scholars like Ehrman bracket off the divine inspiration of the Bible to the side, which effectively undercuts the big-picture univocality of the Bible, thus reducing the Bible to a jumble of contradictory texts.

The key to appreciating Ehrman in the most irenic and charitable way is to acknowledge that he has many helpful insights, while being able to detect how the method he uses to do research is formed by the skeptical worldview he embraces, thus informing the kind of conclusions he arrives at, which are at odds with historic orthodox Christianity. There is no such thing as a completely unbiased scholar, despite what Bart Ehrman repeatedly suggests.

In 2022, I reviewed Ehrman’s Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife. In 2023, I reviewed Ehrman’s Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics. In 2024, I wrote a two part review of his Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End.

……….

Stephen De Young, in his The Religion of the Apostles, stands out as one of the most thought-provoking Eastern Orthodox writers, showing how an appreciation for the faith and practices of the early church dovetails with Christian apologetics, in a way that even non-Eastern Orthodox Christians should be able to appreciate. I liken Stephen De Young to be the Eastern Orthodox version of the late Old Testament scholar, Michael Heiser, who has influenced me greatly.

……………………………

To wrap up the year, I read three biographies about a single person, Elisabeth Elliot, perhaps the most prominent female evangelical intellectual and Bible teacher of the latter half of the 20th century. Lucy Austen and Ellen Vaughn wrote some great books, examining one of the most fascinating, complex, and controversial Christians of the past hundred years. The stories about her life were equally riveting, maddening, and entertaining. But my ultimate conclusion is that reading about Elisabeth Elliot’s life challenged me to think more about what it means to act in obedience to Christ, no matter what the cost.

I started a bunch of other fun books, but finished very few of them! Look for some Veracity book reviews in early 2025. On some roadtrips my wife and I took this year, I caught up with a bunch of The Rest is History podcast episodes (my favorite podcast), particular the series about the life and assassination of John F. Kennedy (what a womanizer!),  and the first half of the French Revolution history series. British historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook play off one another to do some great storytelling that I can listen to all day, if I could. Superb stuff!

If you like listening to British accents in podcasts and enjoy history like I do, another great podcast is Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time, put out by the BBC.  Unlike The Rest is History, Melvyn Bragg brings in several experts (mainly from the UK), and he asks very attentive questions to his guests about the topic at hand. I am bit behind in listening to the episodes I want take in, but Baylor University historian Philip Jenkins has a blog post outlining kind of a “best of” selection of the best In Our Time episodes.

Right now, I am most excited about the year 2025 being the 1700th anniversary of the writing of the Nicene Creed. That’s right. 1700 years ago, the first and perhaps most important church council (after the Jerusalem council described in Acts 15) met to hammer out the first universal creed of the Christian faith.

If you like podcasts, you might want to look into the Passages podcast which covers the history and theology of the Nicene Creed, put out by the good folks at MereOrthodoxy.com, to get you primed for learning about this most important creed which unites billions of Christians together today.

Have a Happy New Year, and welcome in 2025!!

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November 27, 2024

Religion of the Apostles, by Stephen De Young, a Multi-Part Review (#4 Concluding Topics: the Lost Tribes, Law, Sacraments, Elders)

By Clarke Morledge

Here we wrap up this review of Stephen De Young’s The Religion of the Apostles: Orthodox Christianity in the First Century, with an assortment a various topics, and some critical reflection.

The Religion of the Apostles, by Stephen De Young, shows how the beliefs and practices of the early church connect with the world of Second Temple Judaism, the historical context for Jesus of Nazareth and the New Testament.

 

The most important parts of The Religion of the Apostles cover the Trinity, the Divine Council, and the Atonement. But after the chapter on the atonement we have a grab bag of topics that I will just toss into this last post of this book review, looking an Eastern Orthodox perspective on the earliest Christians, by Father Stephen De Young.

The Ten Lost Tribes …. and the Gentiles

The next chapter examines what took place to transition the Old Testament people of God, Israel, to that of the New Testament church, made up of both Jew and Gentile alike. De Young makes much of the mystery of what happened to the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, who were conquered and deported by the Assyrians, about 150 years before the destruction of Jerusalem and the Southern Kingdom, by the Babylonians. The message of the prophets was to promise that not only would the Jews of the Southern Kingdom be restored to the land following the Babylonian exile, but that the Ten Lost Tribes associated with the Northern Kingdom would be restored as well.

De Young argues that the process of cultural assimilation of the Ten Lost Tribes meant that “the northern tribes could be restored only from among the Gentiles” (De Young, p. 230). While some might consider this as controversial, we see this in the Jewish “apocryphal” tradition preserved in Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism: “The Hasmonean Kingdom, after the Maccabean revolt, formed a treaty with the Spartans in which they are said to be descendants of Abraham (1Mc 12:21)” (De Young, p. 230).

How else could these Spartans be considering descendants of Abraham if they were not somehow connected to the Ten Lost Tribes? While there is legitimate criticism that a kind of “replacement theology” unfortunately played a negative role in the early church after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., De Young’s argument shows that the Scriptural treatment of the Ten Lost Tribes reveals just how “nonsensical” such a replacement theology really is, going back to a Second Temple Jewish context (De Young, p. 237).

This opens up a way of reading Paul’s enigmatic statement in Romans 11:26, “all Israel will be saved.” This may not sound like a big deal to most readers of the Bible, but it serves as a clue as to what Paul was really getting at in the Book of Romans, particularly Romans 9-11,  by demonstrated that Paul was appealing to a known tradition within Second Temple Judaism, about the relationship between the Ten Lost Tribes and the Gentiles, as opposed to just making something up out of his own head.

Was Paul inventing his own weird interpretation of the prophet Hosea in Romans 9:22-26, as some critics of the Bible claim, like Rabbi Tovia Singer? Perhaps not!! The original context for Hosea 2:23 is a reference to Israelites conquered by the Assyrians, but Paul sees this as a reference to the Gentiles. Stephen De Young’s analysis offers a defense of Paul’s reading grounded in the thought world of Second Temple Judaism.

The Law of Moses and the Gentiles

The chapter on “The Law of God” argues that Christ indeed came to fulfill the Law, but that more recent developments in theology, particularly since the Protestant Reformation, have divided the Law of Moses into three categories: the civil, ceremonial, and moral commandments. It is generally thought that Christ fulfilled both the civil and ceremonial aspects of the Law, and yet the moral aspect is still binding on the Christian. However, De Young argues that this three-fold classification is not found in Scripture, as there are no divisions in the text regarding the meaning of the Law (De Young, p. 257ff).

The whole Law of Moses is fulfilled in Christ. The best way of understanding the fulfillment of the entire Law of Moses is through the Sabbath. “The first day of the week, then, becomes the Lord’s Day.” God’s people “now participate in the Resurrection of Christ in anticipation of their own resurrection and eternal life in the world to come” (De Young, p. 264).

The Council of Jerusalem, found in Acts 15, helps us to comprehend the relevance of the Law of Moses in the life of the New Testament church. An appeal to portions of Leviticus were made at the council as the means by which Gentiles can be brought into the community formerly made up of Israel alone, by instructing Gentile believers to follow four commands: to abstain from food dedicated to idols, sexual immorality, from meat with blood still in it, and from blood. It is in this sense that the Law of Moses still applies to all Christians.

Therefore, all four commands of these commands are binding among Christians today. Refusing to eat food offered to idols is still to be followed, as well as the prohibition against sexual immorality, which has been challenged in recent years by certain Christian groups. The author does mention that the eating of blood, and the eating of meat with blood still in it is connected to the context of pagan worship in Leviticus 17:10-14 (De Young, pp. 264-265).

But he does not go into detail on the specifics of how this should be applied today, a significant drawback in this particular chapter. Nevertheless, De Young insists that Eastern Orthodoxy consistently seeks to apply these four commands even today, as well as holding to more ancient worship practices more closely associated with the “ceremonial law,” whereas both Protestant and Roman Catholic Christians have shifted away to varying degrees from such practices, which were standard in the first century church (De Young, pp. 264-275).

As an evangelical Protestant, I am not wholly persuaded that the three-fold distinction of the Mosaic Law, as articulated by John Calvin in his The Institutes of the Christian Religion lacks the Scriptural basis that De Young says it does. But he does make a good argument that the Acts 15:19-20 ruling for accepting believing Gentiles among the people of God is still in force. However, I am inclined to think that the restrictions against eating food from animals still with blood in them, and against eating strangled animals generally, are really admonitions to stay away from practices associated with idolatry. In most Western contexts today, as opposed to theologically-oriented customs in the Ancient Near East, the eating of animal blood has little to do with idolatry.

In the Ancient Near East, animals that were strangled still had blood in them, and since blood has been understood as the symbol of life, and the surrounding pagan cultures around the Israelites used such blood in their worship practices, the Old Testament instructs the people to stay away from such idolatrous worship practices. But while the use of blood is generally not common in idolatrous worship practices today, at least in the Western secular world, there are plenty of idolatrous worship practices that Christians in a secular world context should still stay away from.

Baptism Fulfills Circumcision

De Young closely associates the practice of baptism with being a fulfillment of circumcision. In this way, just as infant Jewish boys were circumcised, so in Christ’s church both infant boys and girls are to be baptized. This is not that far from a covenant theology approach dating back to the Protestant Reformation, which affirms infant baptism, without getting bogged down in certain aspects of baptismal regeneration, which most Protestants vigorously reject; that is, the idea that the very act of baptism in and of itself in some sense saves the person.

“…baptism, like circumcision before it, was never an individual act or pledge. Rather, it has always been, from the very beginning, a communal act of family, clan, tribe, and nation; the new nation that is called by Christ’s name, the Church” (De Young, p. 284).

The emphasis on baptism as a communal act, and not an individual one, is a pretty foreign idea to Western Christians. Baptism is about drawing the believer into the life of the covenant community, just as circumcision identified the Old Testament Jew as a member of national Israel. I wish Stephen De Young would have explained this communal sense of baptism some more.

Linking the Presbyteriate of the Church to the Elders of Israel: The Sacramentality of Eldership

This is a bit of a rabbit trail, but it is an important one. De Young defends the origins of the clerical orders of the church by connecting them back to practices in ancient Israel and Second Temple Judaism. The dominant scholarly narrative has been that the development of church order did not arise until the late first century at the earliest, or even into the second century. This scheme of church order, as articulated primarily in the Pastoral Epistles (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus) sought to domesticate Paul’s message to make it more palatable to the social standards of Greco-Roman culture:

“This narrative has been put forward with such force that it has been used to argue for a later dating of any book of the New Testament that mentions the Church or her orders. In the case of the Pastoral Epistles, it is used to argue that they must be minimally sub-Pauline, reflecting later developments after the end of the apostle’s life” (De Young, p. 288).

In other words, this common scholarly narrative suggests that some admirer of Paul forged letters (the Pastoral Epistles) to make them sound Pauline, but in doing so, changed Paul’s message to make his teaching appear to inline with the cultural standards of the day.

In contrast, according to De Young, Paul really did write the Pastoral Epistles, and he did so with a genuine reason in mind going back to the Old Testament. The great apostles of the early church functioned much like the elders selected by Moses, the seventy, who assisted him in governing the Israelite people in the wilderness (Numbers 11:16-17). Paul then describes what this apostolic ministry looked like in 1 Corinthians 4.

Once the original apostles begin dying and are removed from the scene, the “episkopos,”  or “overseers” or “bishops,” take upon themselves the continuation of the unfulfilled apostolic task.  The “episkopos,” sometimes translated as “herdsman” in the Greek Old Testament, are often interchangeably associated with the “presbyters,” the elders of the church. These overseers/elders are charged to maintain continuity with the original apostolic ministry. In addition to the episcopate and presbyterate (made up of qualified men), an additional level of ministry leadership was added and fleshed out by the second century, to include both a male and female diaconate (De Young, pp.290-291).

It is interesting that De Young ties the New Testament concept of elders to the elders of ancient Israel, and not to the Levitical priesthood. For many Protestant Christians today, it is still somewhat confusing when the concept of “elder” (“presbyter,” in Greek) is often interchanged with the notion of “priest.” But when one realizes that the term “priest” is simply the shortened version of “presbyter,” this should be less problematic to those Protestants who are wary of connecting “elder” and “priest” together. In other words, a “priest” in the early church did not strictly correspond to a Jewish Temple “priest,” if it did at all.

We know this from the New Testament as the Book of Hebrews (Hebrews 7:13-17) mentions that Jesus is a priest, not in the order of Aaron, but rather in the order of Melchizedek, a point that De Young brings out (De Young, p. 286). De Young does not connect the dots here, but this would suggest that the concept of New Testament “elder” is tied back to this earlier notion of priesthood, and not the priesthood of the Second Temple. The Levitical priesthood, associated with the ritual of the temple, which no longer physically exists, has now been superseded by the final sacrificial ministry of Christ. But the concept of priesthood more generally, as with the priesthood of Melchizedek, still has relevance.

There is, of course, the “priesthood of all believers” which suggests that Christ is the sole mediator between believers and God. Nevertheless, there is still a kind of continuity that the New Testament concept of presbyter (elder) has with the Old Testament, demonstrating that the office of elder by the early Christians was not simply some invention without precedent. Elders are not “above” other believers, as though they are members of a superior class, but they do serve a specific sacramental function in the life of the local church.

Many Protestants tend to miss this, ignoring the sacramental function of New Testament “elder,” however ill-defined this might be, for fear that this might be confused with the more medieval sacerdotal practice of Roman Catholicism. Granted, there is no explicit teaching found in the New Testament which links the Old and New Testament concepts of “elder” and “sacrament” together, but De Young makes a strong case that the early church did understand it this way. When “elder” is understood without a sacramental sense standing behind it, then the notion of “elder” in Protestant circles tends to get relegated to the sense of the person or persons “in charge,” or a purely administrative “board of directors,” which does not carry the proper sense and function of the New Testament word.

Presbyters (Elders)… And “Women in Ministry” in the Early Church

Furthermore, while De Young also does not mention this, his reasoning would further explain why Jesus only selected men to be his twelve apostles, despite the fact that women figured prominently in Jesus’ earthly ministry, several of whom effectively bankrolled the itinerant movements of the wandering band of Jesus’ disciples, and who were the first witnesses to the Resurrection.

Some have suggested that Jesus only selected men to be among “the Twelve” in order to be sensitive to the cultural norms of the day. But this argument is highly problematic. For example, this type of egalitarian apologetic does not seem consistent with the Jesus who made mincemeat of other cultural norms of the day, by publicly rebuking Pharisees, challenging normative interpretations of the Sabbath laws, throwing out the money changers in the Temple, and even challenging the very Temple system itself. Why would Jesus be so forceful in challenging those cultural norms of the day while being so timid with the question of women being possible candidates among the Twelve?

Instead, it is apparent from reading The Religion of the Apostles that the Paul’s establishment of the office of elder (presbytery) is meant to continue the apostolic ministry that he, and other apostles, original represented, to ensure that the Christian movement would stay on the right track, after that original group of apostles were dying off and leaving the scene. In the pastoral letters in particular, Paul is greatly concerned about false teachers corrupting his own teaching that he was trying to pass on. This is why Paul charged the elders of the church in Ephesus to properly stay in alignment with his teachings and to protect the people (the sheep) from being led astray from false teachings, as Paul was quite clear that he would not return to them (Acts 20:17-38).

It follows then, that it would be consistent that Paul would restrict the office of elder/overseer in 1 Timothy to be only for qualified men, while still affirming the leadership roles of women in other areas, like deacon. If Paul believes that the office of elder/overseer was meant to carry on the role of the original apostles, once the apostles were dead and gone from the earthly scene, as was evidently the case in the early church, then it would make sense for Paul to only designate qualified men to serve as elders/overseers, consistent with how Jesus designated those who were among the Twelve.

De Young’s treatment of the development of the presbytery (office of elders) resolves a number of lingering questions in my mind. For if Paul indeed did follow Jesus’ model for selecting the twelve male disciples to be the original group of “elders,” and copy Jesus in establishing the presbytery to continue the apostolic ministry of that first generation of Jesus’ inner circle, it does raise the question as to why both Jesus and Paul had only men in mind for this, considering that women were also highly valued as disciples and in exercising leadership functions themselves.

Yet De Young demonstrates that it was not the Aaronic line and its association with the Jewish temple priesthood that Jesus or Paul had in mind to emulate. Rather, it was the position of Jewish elders grounded in the twelve patriarch fathers of Jacob’s sons that served as the model. Jesus’ selection of twelve Jewish men as apostles was therefore not simply a one-time, one-off fulfillment of some Old Testament prophecy, but rather, it set a pattern for the early church moving forward beyond the lifetimes of those original twelve.

We might also add that the priesthood in the order of Melchizedek is relevant. De Young associates the celebration of the Lord’s Supper as being an imitation of the priesthood of Melchizedek (De Young, p. 287). The office of elder can be thought of as a sacramental reminder that the local church is a kind of expression of the twelve tribes of Israel, extending back through history, preserving a long line of family lineage. I am only guessing, but it would have been more helpful if Stephen De Young could have “tied off the bow” with the discussion, as this seemed to be where he was aiming.

All of what has been noted above concerning the office of elder is hotly contested within Protestant evangelical circles today. The debate among complementarian and egalitarian Christians continues to divide Protestant evangelicals, as to the roles of women and men in church leadership. Complementarians insist that Paul’s directive in 1 Timothy 2 & 3 has a universally binding character, while disagreeing amongst themselves as to how the distinction between men and women in church office is to be applied. The main feature common among most complementarians has been that only qualified men are to serve as elders in a local church, whereas there are no gendered restrictions anywhere else in the New Testament church. In other words, women may lead in the church in various ways, but that the office of elder has been reserved for qualified men.

Alternatively, egalitarians, at least the most exegetically sensitive ones, say that Paul’s teaching regarding men and women in 1 Timothy suggests a different context, focusing on the particular issue of female false teachers in Ephesus specifically. Many such Protestant egalitarians reject any sacramental function served by local church elders, preferring a more secular-type role for elders in terms of Christian leadership. Yet this egalitarian perspective is inconsistent with a more general, universalizing design for church offices, a view classically held by Eastern Orthodox thinkers, including Stephen De Young.

Is the New Testament Canon of Scripture Fixed? In Eastern Orthodoxy, the Answer is Yes

The charge of misogyny against the early church in terms of women in local church leadership is a highly sensitive matter in today’s culture. Much of the controversy stems back to how early church history is interpreted. Yet as I have suggested before, if it could be successfully argued that the pastoral letters of Paul, including 1 Timothy, were indeed outright forgeries, then this would most simply settle the matter in favor of the egalitarian concerns, without the complex exegetical gymnastics often associated with those egalitarians who try to defend Pauline authorship.

But there is no indication that such a revision of the canon would ever be accepted in Eastern Orthodoxy. Nor does there seem to be any significant felt need to attempt such a revision. I doubt that such a re-evaluation of the canon of the New Testament will take place in other branches of Christianity, like Roman Catholicism or Protestantism (except for perhaps progressive Christian Protestants). While many modern scholars have their doubts about the authenticity of 1 Timothy, Eastern Orthodox tradition solidly affirms 1 Timothy as genuinely Pauline, and started to do so fairly early within the history of the early church. As indicated by De Young, the whole array of Eastern Orthodox church offices depends upon the entirety of the tradition drawn from the pastoral letters, primarily including 1 Timothy.

Yet while Stephen De Young sees a certain kind of continuity between the Paul of 1 Timothy and his Second Temple Jewish forebears regarding relations between men and women in the worship assembly, there is also a discontinuity. Some, though not all, Second Temple Jewish texts do suggest a kind of misogyny. For example, the pseudepigraphical Apocalypse of Moses, which scholars date as a Jewish writing from the time period of Jesus, reads a completely different twist into the Genesis narrative. According to the Apocalypse of Moses, Eve and the serpent had a sexual relationship with each other, at the instigation of the devil. A plot was then conceived to cast Adam out of the Garden of Eden. In contradiction to Genesis, Adam was not even present when Eve and the serpent had their discussion about the forbidden fruit, thereby deceiving the innocent Adam in the process.

Nevertheless, the early church rejected this particular narrative, in favor of a different tradition within Second Temple Judaism. In other words, it is better to speak of “Judaisms” in the plural as opposed to “Judaism” in the singular when when we think of the Second Temple Jewish tradition.

The early church followed certain strands of Judaism, or certain “Judaisms,” while rejecting others. Some of these rejected “Judaisms” helps us to explain how certain Christian heresies became popular in the early church. For example, the Gospel of Thomas, probably dated to the second century, was deemed not worthy of inclusion in the New Testament canon, in part because of its teaching that women must somehow become men in order to find salvation, a view which historic orthodox Christianity, in both the East and the West, flatly rejected. If there is ever clear evidence of misogyny in the early centuries of the Christian movement, it was surely in the kind of Gnostic heresy reflected in the Gospel of Thomas.

Paul’s push towards having a female diaconate, most exemplified by the example of Phoebe in the Book of Romans, shows clear evidence of being accepted within early Christian communities. The common assumption that women never had leadership positions within the early church is without foundation, as the ministry of the diaconate served a vital role in the early centuries of the Christian church. Nevertheless, the practice of having a female diaconate faded out in later years of Eastern Orthodoxy. It suggests to me that given the evidence at hand, Scriptural and historical, that Eastern Orthodoxy might be open towards re-establishing a female diaconate…. or at least they should.

Critical Evaluation of The Religion of the Apostles: MORE FOOTNOTES PLEASE!!

One other observation to note in Religion of the Apostles is the lengthy discussion regarding the peculiar reference in 1 Corinthians 15 about the “baptism for the dead” in the chapter about redeemed humanity’s role within the Divine Council (De Young, pp. 161ff). But this must be saved to a future blog post.

While The Religion of the Apostles is very thorough and helpful, there are some drawbacks with the book. The most troubling is the unevenness regarding De Young’s footnotes. Sometimes De Young pinpoints the ancient Second Temple sources he uses to make his case. But too many times De Young fails to adequately cite his sources,  leaving the reader with incomplete footnotes. To me this explains why some other reviewers of The Religion of the Apostles have concluded that De Young is over promising what he actually delivers in the book.

Perhaps De Young opted to try to keep his footnotes to a minimum in order to make his book more accessible to his intended audience. I can imagine that if De Young would have fleshed out his footnotes it might have doubled the size of the book, and he did not want to do that.  If this is the case, then perhaps De Young should consider a second edition of The Religion of the Apostles with more extensive footnotes, enabling readers to better see for  themselves what sources he is using.

Some claims are even made by De Young that lack any source citation whatsoever. “The four rivers that flow from Eden are the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Nile, and the Danube” (p. 174).  Those last two rivers are typically found in English translations of Genesis 2:10-14 as the Pishon and the Gihon, which are not the same as the Nile and the Danube, at least to my knowledge. So, where does De Young get the Nile and Danube from? De Young is assuming certain details as common knowledge among his readers, which is not the case.

Eastern Orthodox Apologetic Stumbling Blocks

The apologetic purpose of Stephen De Young might serve as a stumbling block for those who might benefit the most from his book. There is plenty in The Religion of the Apostles which will ruffle the feathers of those outside of the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Evangelical egalitarians will bristle against the idea that the concept of a male-only presbyteriate goes back to Jewish sources grounded in the Old Testament, and perhaps even Jesus’ selection of twelve men as the original apostles, as opposed to some adoption of Greco-Roman misogyny which supposedly crept into the early church, as some evangelical egalitarians imagine.

Evangelical Protestants of all stripes will find offense at the suggestion that Protestants have erred by leaving a deep hole in the history of God’s revelation, by ignoring various books of intertestamental literature (known as the “Apocyrpha” in Protestant circles), which the Eastern Orthodox consider to be Scripture (De Young, p. 14). Roman Catholics will be chagrined at charges of unwarranted accretions in the Catholic Mass, and other areas of Roman Catholic doctrine (De Young, p. 285), for which the Eastern Orthodox see as innovations away from the original religion of the apostles.

As might be expected from an Eastern Orthodox theologian, De Young cites evidence from the Old Testament which affirms the veneration of Mary, as the “Theotokos,” though not certainly not as dogmatic as what you can find from some Roman Catholic writers. De Young cites 1 Kings 2:19 to show that Solomon had a second throne placed on his right hand for his mother, Bathsheba, as queen, establishing the precedence for Marian devotion which arose during the early church period (De Young, p. 152). Protestants probably will not find such evidence to be convincing. Along with a variety of other Eastern Orthodox distinctives, there will be Roman Catholic and Protestant readers who will not be persuaded by particular arguments made here and there.

The Religion of the Apostles of the First Century: Tied to Certain Second Temple Judaic Traditions

However, the greatest value of The Religion of the Apostles is not in its apologetic for Eastern Orthodoxy, but rather in its tying the earliest beliefs and practices of the Christian church back to beliefs and practices associated within Second Temple Judaism. Stephen De Young may or may not present arguments which will ultimately sway readers to embrace Eastern Orthodoxy. For example, I remain currently unpersuaded by Stephen De Young’s apologetic, but I appreciate the challenge he brings to some of the deficiencies of evangelical Protestantism.  Nevertheless, De Young challenges the evolutionary notion that much of the early church beliefs and practices were pure innovations disconnected from the Second Temple Judaism that preceded it. This insight is worth the price of the book alone.

As one can probably tell from the length of this review, over multiple blog posts, The Religion of the Apostles is a remarkably substantial book coming in at about 320 pages. But while the topics covered are many, the argumentation is concise, dealing with fundamental matters of doctrine, and answering many, many questions about the Bible along the way.

Much of what Stephen De Young writes about, particularly as that which pertains to theological strands within Second Temple Judaism and the Divine Council, will be new to some readers. But De Young’s book should sufficiently demonstrate that the contribution of contemporary scholarship which seeks to retrieve significant elements within Second Temple Jewish thought is far from being “new,” as some uninformed critics have wrongly claimed. As a reminder, it is important to repeat that Second Temple Jewish thought was wide-ranging, and that the teachings of the New Testament fall in line with certain particular elements of Second Temple Jewish thought, and not the whole range of Second Temple era ideas. In summary, the thematic content addressed in The Religion of the Apostles goes back to the early church era, and even beyond that, back to particular strands of Judaism in Jesus’ day, which is also the main point made by the late Protestant Old Testament scholar, Michael Heiser, in his book The Unseen Realm.

In many ways, The Religion of the Apostles is the Eastern Orthodox version of Michael Heiser’s work found in The Unseen Realm. (Father Stephen De Young is also pleasant to listen to, as his narrates himself the whole of the Audible audiobook version of The Religion of the Apostles).

Stephen De Young’s treatment of the development of the doctrine of the Trinity stands out as a particularly helpful apologetic for Nicene orthodoxy.  The same could also be said regarding the doctrine of the atonement, offering a bridge where common ground can be held for Western and Eastern Christians alike.

I can engage with at least one friendly critic briefly at the end of this review here. Kaspars Ozolins, a research associate at the Tyndale House in Cambridge, England, and a thankfully informed, sympathetic, and competent reviewer of efforts to educate the church about Divine Council theology, still says that an emphasis on the Divine Council “is sometimes imbalanced and suffers from a deliberate attempt to downplay the church’s historical engagement with Scripture.” Yet readers of The Religion of the Apostles will find a cogent argument which does the exact opposite, emphasizing the church’s historical engagement with Scripture to make its case for continuity between historic Christian orthodoxy and Second Temple Judaism. Evangelicals would do well to take such Divine Council theology more seriously as an apologetic answer to those critical scholars, going back to the German higher critical movement of the 19th century, to say that early Christianity, and even the New Testament itself, was primarily a product of syncretism with Hellenistic philosophy and theology.

Those who are skeptical about the theology of the Divine Council would do well to read The Religion of the Apostles, to show just how much various early church fathers accepted certain Second Temple Jewish interpretive traditions into their reading of the New Testament.  I just wish that Stephen De Young would have beefed up his footnotes and interacted more with critics. Hopefully, such criticism will get back to De Young, and  spur him on in writing an expanded future second edition of this important work. But if footnotes do not matter to you, you will still benefit from Stephen De Young’s expert combination of scholarship grounded in Second Temple Judaism and the teachings of the early church.

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November 20, 2024

Religion of the Apostles, by Stephen De Young, a Multi-Part Review (#3 The Atonement)

By Clarke Morledge

When we say that Jesus died for sins, what do we mean by that exactly?

Stephen De Young in his The Religion of the Apostles: Orthodox Christianity in the First Century dives into this topic, which has at times caused some friction between evangelical Protestant and Eastern Orthodox Christians. But perhaps both sides have more in common than many realize. In the interest of Christian apologetics, both Protestant and Eastern Orthodox Christians together have an answer to give to those secular and progressive critics who say that Christians invented their doctrine of atonement, based on the assertion that atonement had nothing to do with the message that Jesus taught.

 

The Religion of the Apostles, by Stephen De Young, shows how the beliefs and practices of the early church connect with the world of Second Temple Judaism, the historical context for Jesus of Nazareth and the New Testament.

 

Forgiveness Without Atonement?

Bart Ehrman, a religion professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, perhaps the most influential living skeptic of historically orthodox Christianity, makes an argument which will probably shock the average Christian. For Ehrman, Jesus preached a message of forgiveness, whereas Christianity as an organized faith teaches a message of atonement, which are two completely different things.

For Ehrman, forgiveness is simply “letting go” the fault of another person, without any price or payment associated with it. The only condition for extending forgiveness is repentance, the act of turning from a sinful act, with the intention never to commit the sinful act again.

Atonement, on the other hand, is about a payment for debt incurred by sin, in order to cancel the debt. Unless a payment has been made, the debt can not be canceled.

In Ehrman’s mind, Jesus was all about forgiveness, whereas his followers, particular those who followed the Apostle Paul, changed Jesus teaching in order to stress an atonement for sin instead. For example, in Mark 2:1-12 when Jesus heals the paralytic lowered through a roof in Capernaum, Jesus forgave the man’s sins. There was no mention of atonement. There was no mention of needing to go to the Temple to make a sacrifice. No sacrifice was necessary. God, through Jesus, simply forgave the man.

Ehrman goes on saying that in the Gospel of Luke, and even in the Book of Acts, there is no doctrine of atonement. In Acts following Jesus’ death and resurrection, Jesus’ death is frequently mentioned, but it is never connected with atonement. As Ehrman argues, for Luke, “Jesus’ death makes you realize how you have sinned against God and you turn to God and beg his forgiveness, and he forgives you.  No one pays your debt; God simply forgives it.”

It was not until we get to the Apostle Paul, and perhaps others in the early Jesus movement, that we get the sense of atonement as being the full basis for why forgiveness is possible from a Christian perspective.  Repeatedly, Paul makes the case that Jesus’ death actually paid some sort of debt. In Romans 5:8, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” In Ephesians 5:2, “Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”  In Galatians 3:13, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.”

Ehrman adds, however, that in Mark’s Gospel, supposedly someone probably put on the lips of Jesus an idea of atonement, decades after Jesus’ earthly ministry ended. In Mark 10:45, “For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

If Bart Ehrman is correct, then it would appear that a certain group of Christians, which eventually became the “orthodox” party of the early church, essentially invented a theory of atonement to explain the  relationship between Jesus’ death with the forgiveness of sin. The implication should be obvious. From Ehrman’s vantage point, the message of Jesus is ethically superior than the message of Paul: Crudely put, Jesus offers forgiveness for free, while Paul’s brand of forgiveness comes at the cost of a life, human or some other animal.

However, there are some very good reasons for saying that Bart Ehrman is quite wrong about his assessment that Jesus’ message of forgiveness was in stark contrast with the later, supposedly “invented” teaching of the church, associated with Paul.

One of the great benefits Stephen De Young’s The Religion of the Apostles: Orthodox Christianity in the First Century is that it offers a convincing apologetic for why a theology of atonement is fully integrated into the teachings of Jesus, as seen through the lens of Second Temple Jewish thinking. While Religion of the Apostles does not directly address Bart Ehrman’s critique of Pauline Christianity, as being morally inferior to the teachings of Jesus, Stephen De Young lays down a foundation for why the forgiveness of sins is intricately connected with the concept of atonement. Far from being an invention of the early church, the New Testament doctrine of atonement is drawn from centuries of Jewish meditation on the Old Testament Scriptures.

“The Scriptures and the Fathers understand Christ’s atoning death as the revelation of His divine glory. Atonement as it took place in the Old Covenant, as described in the Hebrew Scriptures, represents a partial and preliminary revelation of the glory of Christ, which comes to its fullness in His death on the Cross” (DeYoung, p. 192)

In other words, Christianity did not invent atonement and decades later bolt it somehow onto the teachings of Jesus concerning forgiveness. Rather, the life, death, and resurrection all stand within the steady stream of Jewish thought during the period when the Second Temple was still standing in Jerusalem. The New Testament shows us how Jesus fulfills and thereby transcends certain older ways of thinking about atonement, something not limited to the world of Judaism in the first century and its Temple in Jerusalem. The sacrifice of Jesus on the cross enables the message of God’s forgiveness of sins to be a universal message, empowering a universal message of forgiveness with respect to God (vertically) and with one’s neighbor (horizontally).

For Stephen De Young, there have been a number of theories about atonement discussed in Christian theology which are either only partially supported by Scripture, or some even not found in Scripture at all.  In this third blog post in this book review series, we now take a closer look into De Young’s defense of an Old Testament-grounded theology of atonement which the early church adopted through divine revelation. De Young’s full treatment in his apologetic has some minor problems, as I see it, but in the long run, his understanding of the early church view of atonement offers an adequate answer to Bart Ehrman’s skepticism.

Forgiveness Is Not As Easy As Some May Think

Here is an anecdote to show why Bart Ehrman’s viewpoint is unsatisfactory: About 13 years ago, my wife took our Italian greyhound out for a walk in the neighborhood, as she normally did. We live in a rural area, where few dog owners in our neighborhood keep their dogs on a lease. Suddenly, one of our neighbor’s dogs, a rather large one, jumped out onto the road where my wife was strolling along with our rather small, 10-pound greyhound. This big dog mauled our little greyhound, grabbing him by the throat, thrashing him around. The big dog finally let go, but our Italian greyhound was permanently injured by the incident.

The combination of the physical and the emotional trauma led to a severe decline and eventually an early death of our little dog less than two years later.

We were able to forgive our neighbors for allowing their dog to go free without a leash, and then attack our dog, but it was difficult. We spent hours and hours trying to nurse our dog back to health, not to mention the costly visits to the vet, only to watch our dog slowly lose his zest for life due to the trauma.

Our neighbors received our forgiveness, but it was not easy for them to fully accept it. Their big dog had himself experienced some abuse earlier in his life, so it was not altogether unexpected for him to lash out on our Italian greyhound. They had tried other ways help their big dog to become healthier and better behaved, but that proved to be very difficult. I am not sure what exactly happened with that dog, but the dog did not remain very long in our neighborhood after that.

No amount of money for vet visits could have ever fully helped out our little Italian greyhound come back to full health. I am convinced that our neighbors continued to feel guilt about the incident for years to come, as they were reminded about it every time they saw my wife or myself trying to walk our dog down the street again, much slower than before the attack.

We paid a price to extend our forgiveness. Our neighbors paid a price in terms of the guilt they experienced.

Chances are, as you are reading this, you can think of examples in your own life where it was difficult to forgive someone else for some wrong committed against you. You might even think of examples when someone tried to forgive you of something you did, and you still ended up feeling guilty.

Forgiveness is costly. It is not as easy as some may think.

The idea that forgiveness can be extended or obtained without paying some sort of price, as Bart Ehrman suggests, is unrealistic.

Atonement in the Early Church

In The Religion of the Apostles, Stephen De Young rejects the idea of different “models” to describe Christ’s atonement, which he sees is a movement away from “describing” what Christ accomplished on the cross towards “explaining” how and why Christ accomplished what he did (De Young, p. 191). To his point, we can get so bogged down with which model best explains the atonement that we miss the big picture. That the atonement works is what ultimately matters, more so than trying to tease out how it works.

Nevertheless, De Young’s rejection of various models, like that of penal substitutionary atonement, seems to this reviewer to be a bit of special pleading. Everyone has a theory of how atonement works, whether one realizes it or not. But happily this reviewer agrees with De Young that a Christian need not pick one model and thereby reject other models. There is a richness in understanding how Christ’s atonement for sin works, drawing from multiple models, each one potentially offering a different dimension of thought not fully addressed by other models. Stephen De Young is sensitive to this, and rightly so.

For example, later in the book, De Young notes that the Jewish Passover, which is connected to Christ’s own sacrifice had no concept of substitution associated with the ritual:

“There is no indication that the lamb is being killed instead of a firstborn human losing his life. This is clear for several reasons when the text is read carefully. No attention is paid by the ritual text to the killing of the lamb. This means that its death is incidental to the ritual, not part of it. Rather, the focus is on how the lamb is to be cooked and eaten (Ex. 12:3–11)” (De Young, p. 234).

But this need not indicate that Christ’s sacrifice lacked any sense of substitution, as there are other elements in Jewish atonement tradition which are substitutionary in character. In Eastern Orthodoxy, there is a general sentiment that penal substitutionary atonement is to be rejected.  Well, at least the penal concept is rejected, while retaining the substitutionary atonement part. Historically, the penal substitutionary model has been the standard evangelical Protestant view of Christ’s atonement. However, in the modern period, a number of Protestants have grown squeamish about penal substitution today as well.

But much of this sentiment against the standard Protestant view of atonement relies on a caricature of penal substitution. This caricature wrongly assumes that the loving Son of God is killed on the cross in order the appease the anger of God the Father against human wrongdoing. It carries the sense of a kind, loving Son who has to somehow assuage the uncontrolled wrath of an angry Father, who is royally ticked off at humanity.

This caricature was driven home to me when I heard it preached at a youth evangelistic event years ago. The speaker pictured God the Father as being so angered by sin that he acts as a judge and executioner who must impose punishment on the sinner. The Father has a gun and must shoot the sinner, standing in as a representative for “us;” that is, all of humanity, in order to satiate his anger. However, at the last minute, the kind and sacrificial Son steps into view, the Father turns the gun towards the Son, and takes the bullet on our behalf.

Looking back, I know that the speaker had meant well, and no illustration of the meaning of the cross is perfect. But this type of illustration is pretty terrible.

To the contrary, Jesus as the Son of God is just as angry with human sin as the Father is. Likewise, the Father is just as loving towards humanity as the Son of God is. The key to understanding the doctrine of atonement, and its relationship to the forgiveness of sins, is that Jesus’ death on the cross is an act of self-sacrifice. Because of God’s self-sacrificial love for us, not only are we forgiven of our sins, we are also enabled and empowered as humans to self-sacrificially extend forgiveness towards others who have hurt us.

De Young’s efforts at “describing” Christ’s atonement show that a broad array of Scriptural themes can be brought to bear on the meaning of Christ’s atonement, including elements that make up the doctrine of penal substitution; that is, the teaching that Jesus died in our place in order to pay the penalty for our sins. Admittedly, some evangelical Protestants wrongly focus exclusively on penal substitution, so in this sense, Stephen De Young’s closer look at how Second Temple Judaism influenced the early church offers a very helpful corrective to the typical Protestant caricature of the doctrine of atonement.

God’s Wrath and a Better Understanding of Propitiation

De Young acknowledges the role the wrath of God plays in purifying the sinner of sin, as in a purifying fire, and he helpfully points out the Old Testament language of God being “slow to anger,” which is rooted in a Hebrew idiom of being “long of nose” (De Young, p. 194). De Young accepts the concept of propitiation, which is often seen as the heart of the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement. Perhaps as an Eastern Orthodox priest, Stephen De Young is not far off from an historic, standard Protestant view of atonement? But helpfully, he notes that propitiation has a simple meaning:

“it means to render someone propitious, or favorably disposed. At its most basic level, it refers to an offering that is pleasing to God” (De Young, p. 203).

The pagan form of propitiation does not map well onto the biblical form of propitiation. For in pagan sacrificial ritual, the killing of an animal is required to satiate the wrath of the gods. But in the Bible, “attempting to import this concept into the sacrificial system established in the Torah is simply impossible. Much of the sacrificial system of the Law does not even involve the killing of an animal, even though the offerings it calls for are always food” (De Young, p. 203). Instead, it is the pleasing aroma that is offered up to God that matters. The actual killing of the animal itself is not tied to the propitiation towards Yahweh.

‘Some sort of punishment or suffering on the part of the sacrificial animal was no part of the ritual. Even in the case of whole burnt offerings—which stipulated that the entire animal be burned and thereby given to Yahweh—it is not sacrificed alive but is killed first, unceremonially……. The more common language used in the Scriptures for God’s appreciation for His portion of sacrificial meals is that these sacrifices are a pleasing aroma (as in Gen. 8:21; Lev. 1:9, 13; 2:2; 23:18). This same language is applied to the sacrifice of Christ in the New Testament (in Eph. 5:2 and the Father’s statement that in Christ He is “well pleased”)’ (De Young, p. 203).

This more mature view of propitiation goes against the common misunderstanding about propitiation, pedaled by those such as Bart Ehrman. Ehrman’s false view wrongly links biblical propitiation with some “barbaric” requirement of an animal death meant to satiate the supposed bloodthirsty demands of an angry god. This is the worst caricature of all regarding the doctrine of atonement in Christianity. As the late Michael Heiser has said, “It is not that God is thirsty for blood.”

De Young also links God’s justice less with retributive justice, whereby criminals are merely punished for their crimes, and more with distributive justice, which is more linked to civil law. Someone has been wronged, and therefore an attempt is made to try to rectify the wrong so that the injured party can be made whole (De Young, p. 196).

While the following analogy does not work well for vegetarians, the analogy that I can think of to best begin to explain this is the experience of eating a good steak on a grill. What makes someone happy, or pleased, or “propitious” about a good steak meal is not the fact that a cow had to be killed to supply the meat. What makes for a pleasing or “propitious” steak meal is the aroma of a freshly cooked steak on the grill, and the eventual eating of that steak. This is reasonably close to the idea that the pleasant aroma of a cooked sacrificial meat is what is “propitious” in God’s perspective, not the killing of the animal to supply the meat. This is the basic difference between a biblical view of propitiation versus a pagan view of propitiation which celebrates the killing of an animal.

Propitiation, rightly understood therefore, is not about God’s supposed inner need to kill someone or some animal, or have someone or some animal killed to make God happy. Israel’s pagan neighbors had that understanding but not Israel herself. Rather, as Joel Edmund Anderson puts it in his review of The Religion of the Apostles, propitiation celebrates “the restoration of relationship and a demonstration of His justice and righteousness.”

Other Dimensions of Atonement Theology

De Young highlights Colossians 2:14 as an expression of atonement theology: ““He canceled the handwriting in the decrees against us, which were opposed to us. And He has taken it from our midst, by nailing it to the Cross.” Sin is here associated with the concept of debt, in that Christ’s death canceled the debt of sin (De Young, pp. 206ff). De Young goes on to say that this made perfect sense in Paul’s first century context, as the slavery system of the time was employed as a means of paying off debt.

“Slavery in the ancient world was not primarily an instrument of racial or ethnic oppression. Rather, it was primarily an economic institution. With no concept of bankruptcy in the modern sense, the means by which a debt that could not be paid would be settled was indentured servitude. A person would work off the debt by becoming a slave” (De Young, p. 207)

This understanding of slavery is helpful in that it is a stark contrast with the type of slavery practiced in the American antebellum South, which was specifically racial in character. While not answering every question about what the Bible has to say about slavery, De Young frames the discussion in a way that can assist us to get past many of the polemical critiques against Christianity today.

Furthermore, the atoning work of Christ is universal in character, impacting every human being (1 John 2:2; De Young, p. 215). Yet this universal character is often misunderstood (De Young, p. 209). As a result, De Young’s rejects the doctrine of universalism, most notably defended by a fellow Eastern Orthodox scholar, David Bentley Hart (See Veracity analysis of universalism espoused by David Bentley Hart). For De Young, universalism as those like David Bentley Hart presents it, is a Christian heresy that is fully dismissed by Eastern Orthodox tradition, contra David Bentley Hart. (For a substantial interaction with David Bentley Hart’s universalism thesis, one should consult this episode of the Lord of Spirits podcast for a full critique. For a modest, cautious defense of David Bentley Hart with respect to Stephen De Young’s critique, see this essay by Jesse Hake).

Interestingly, De Young shows that certain strands of Eastern Orthodoxy have preserved certain Second Temple Jewish understandings of atonement, that are typically unknown to Protestants: “Texts such as the Apocalypse of Abraham, which has been preserved in Slavonic by the Orthodox Church, describe an ultimate eschatological Day of Atonement” (De Young, p. 218).

Another Second Temple Jewish tradition linked to atonement theology, associated with the figure of “Azazel,” can be found in the Book of Enoch. In the Enoch literature, Azazel is identified as the leader of angels which rebel from Yahweh, those members of the divine council that sought to subvert God’s ultimate rule (DeYoung, p. 125).

1 Enoch 10:8 says, “The whole earth has been corrupted through the works taught by Azazel; to him credit all sin” (compare 1 John 3:8; 5:19). (DeYoung, p. 125).

One other particular observation that De Young makes is very intriguing: Several translations of Leviticus 16:8 link Azazel with the scapegoat, sent out into the wilderness as part of the Jewish atonement rituals. “And Aaron shall cast lots over the two goats, one lot for the Lord and the other lot for Azazel” (Lev. 16:8 ESV, De Young p. 218). Compare with the NIV translation that renders “Azazel” with “scapegoat” instead. The goat is sent out into the wilderness, from where the sins of the people came, back to the spiritual evil powers who instigated those sins (De Young, p. 217-218). Oh, and yes, the concept of a scapegoat is inherently substitutionary in character (at least that is my read on it. De Young is not clear on this point).

But the other goat involved in this ritual, the one that gets killed, is not killed as an act of sacrifice. The sins of the people are not placed on this other goat, and then killed. Rather, this goat is killed in order to share a meal celebrating the removal of sin represented by the activity of the other goat, the scapegoat, who does take the sins of the people away (See Michael Heiser’s video on the same topic).

What is apparently clear is that that this substitutionary aspect of the scapegoat does not involve a bloody sacrifice. Jesus is our scapegoat, who by way of substitution takes our sins upon himself, thereby achieving atonement through Christ’s work on the cross.

Frankly, of all of the chapters in The Religion of the Apostles, De Young’s chapter on atonement is perhaps the most challenging and difficult to assess. On the negative side, De Young tends to fall back on this caricature of an historic Protestant view of atonement at various points. But to De Young’s credit, on the positive side, he ultimately lands in the right place as far as I can tell. The Religion of the Apostles may not satisfactorily resolve the differences between historical Protestant and Eastern Orthodox understandings of the atonement, but it takes the conversation into a very constructive direction. I intend on revisiting this chapter again in the future, to make sure I have understood Stephen De Young correctly.

De Young’s conclusion in this chapter finally connects the concept of atonement with the restoration of Adam. Adam was originally sent on a mission to rule the world, but the problem of sin short-circuited that mission. The work of Christ on the cross puts humanity back on the right track. This work of Christ accomplished something that the Jewish ritualized system of atonement was not able to fully do. In turn, Christians today are given the privilege to participate in the reality of Christ’s finished work through ritual:

The New Testament narrative of Christ’s atoning work is enacted, made real, and participated in by members of the Church as community through ritual. This participation produces repentance, which brings about forgiveness, cleansing, and the healing of sin.

For Israel and Judea, ritual represented a curse postponed and a deadly infection managed. Christ through His acceptance of the curse has removed His people from it. He has removed the threat of death and ended the exile by restoring humanity to Paradise in coming, as God, to dwell in our midst (De Young, p. 215).

The Christian church is then called upon to proclaim and embody that message to the whole world:

“The entire creation is now the possession of our Lord Jesus Christ, who wields all authority within it. We, as His assembly the Church, bring that rule and its effects to realization within the world as we receive God’s creation, bless it, and hallow it” (De Young, 229).

Stephen De Young does not come right out and say it, but the doctrine of substitutionary atonement is clearly present in Eastern Orthodoxy, and certainly goes back to the apostolic era, and beyond into ancient Judaism. Some will surely debate and quibble about the “penal” association with substitutionary atonement, but it is helpful to know that the Western and Eastern understanding of Christ’s atoning work may not be so far apart as it is often described.

I have just attempted to pull out the best takeaways from Stephen De Young’s approach to atonement. Trying to tease all of the data points out from this chapter of The Religion of the Apostles, and synthesizing them is too difficult to do in this book review. Hopefully, this survey will whet the appetite of the reader to go out and get a copy of Stephen DeYoung’s book and meditate on what he writes in his chapter on atonement.

Forgiveness and Atonement Are Bound Together

Real forgiveness involves restoration, and such restoration is costly. We as humans often miss this because we are finite creatures with limited resources whereas God is infinite, possessing unlimited resources. Still, the atoning work of Christ on the cross actually cost God something, though we have trouble seeing this. My earlier example of our little Italian greyhound suffering an attack by a big dog belonging to one of our neighbors should make more sense now.

This emphasis on connecting forgiveness with restoration helps to explain that even if you have wronged someone else, and that other person has supposedly “forgiven” you, it does not always feel right. You can still feel guilty, even if the other person whom you have wronged “lets you off the hook.” It only feels right when full restitution has been made somehow.  This ultimate restoration of all things gets at the heart of what Christ’s atoning work on the cross is all about.

In contrast to Bart Ehrman’s view, Stephen De Young sees that the concept of atonement is tied together with Jesus’ teaching of forgiveness. We see this even in the Lord’s Prayer.

“Depending on the Gospel, the Lord’s Prayer asks for the forgiveness either of “debts” or of “trespasses.” The Lord’s Prayer as rendered by St. Matthew’s Gospel refers to the forgiveness of our debts as we forgive our debtors (Matt. 6:9–13). Immediately thereafter, however, as an interpretation of the prayer, Christ says that if we forgive the trespasses of others, then our trespasses will likewise be forgiven (vv. 14–15). Saint Luke, however, phrases the Lord’s Prayer as referring to the forgiveness of our sins as we forgive our debtors (Luke 11:4). The concepts of debt and transgression are so closely aligned in Second Temple-era thought that they can be used interchangeably. In describing the forgiveness of sins, Christ uses debt in several of His parables (see Matt. 18:23–35; Luke 7:36–47)” (DeYoung, p. 207).

The point is that forgiveness is only made possible because of atonement.  Jesus was able to forgive the sins of the paralytic because Christ in a sense knew that his ultimate mission was to pay for the sins of the whole world through his upcoming death. The paralytic did not need to offer a sacrifice because Jesus’ death was still a few years off into the future, a death which thereby paid off the debt of sin incurred by the paralytic. Likewise, today we can receive God’s offer of forgiveness just as the paralytic did.

As Jesus’ disciples were wandering the hills and pathways with the Christ in Galilee, they were not ready to fully understand the meaning of Jesus’ death until after it actually happened. This would explain why the Gospels often talk about Jesus forgiving people of their sins, with no direct reference to atonement. That sense of atonement was something that would not fully come together until Christ’s being nailed to the Cross. It would take decades for the early church to ultimately work through what this all meant and weave this theology into the pages of the New Testament.

We see this principle of atonement intimately connected with forgiveness in terms of how we are to forgive our neighbor when they sin against us. It is extremely difficult simply to forgive someone else of wrongdoing when we have been hurt. If someone recklessly runs over your pet with their car, or cheats you out of your money at the store, or steals your online identity and empties your bank account, that can make it exceedingly difficult to say to anyone, “I forgive you,” even if the one who violated you promises to amend their ways. For even if your offender does show contrition and repents from their wrongdoing, that does not bring your pet back to life, it is no promise that you will get your money back, and it in no way compensates for all of the hours you have to spend trying to clear your name and get control of all of your stolen online assets.

Back to the story about the sad encounter of our little Italian greyhound with a neighborhood dog, the idea of atonement makes sense. It was difficult for me to forgive our neighbor. But the more I reflected on how Jesus paid the penalty for my sin, through his atoning death on the cross, the easier it was for me to eventually forgive my neighbor. Forgiveness did not come right away. I had to work through my own anger, frustration, and sadness quite a bit, but by meditating on Jesus and the cross, forgiveness finally came.

Bart Ehrman’s idea of a Jesus who simply offers forgiveness, without any sense of atonement, in terms of making restitution or otherwise paying off a debt, does not seem very realistic anymore, once you take a closer look at it.

But because Christ has died for us, and forgive us of our sins and canceled our debt, we are then able to extend forgiveness towards others. As we receive the healing mercy and grace of God in erasing the debt of our sins towards God, so are we empowered to extend mercy and grace towards others.  Atonement is what makes forgiveness possible.

 

The next and last post in this multi-part blog review of The Religion of the Apostles will cover an assortment of topics in the rest of Stephen De Young’s book, plus a critical interaction with the book overall.

For a short description of how Eastern Orthodoxy might view something like “penal substitutionary atonement” positively, the following video by Seraphim Hamilton might be of interest:

Protestant YouTube apologist, Gavin Ortlund, suggests a view of penal substitutionary atonement that goes back to the early church, and not something introduced into Western Christian ways of the thinking through some supposed innovation by Anselm.

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November 1, 2024

Religion of the Apostles, by Stephen De Young, a Multi-Part Review (#2 The Divine Council)

By Clarke Morledge

What is the “Divine Council?” Is it some strange heresy…. Or is it something grounded in the worldview of the New Testament and the earliest Christians?

The concept of the “Divine Council” often confuses people. It goes back to a Hebrew word “Elohim,”  used for “god/gods”, occurring over 10,000 times in the Old Testament, found even in very first verse in the Bible, Genesis 1:1.

In the beginning, Elohim created the heavens and the earth.

The word itself is plural, and depending on the context of the verse this could be another name for God, as is the case in Genesis 1:1, or likewise, as in the singular “Yahweh,” or it could refer to a plurality of divine beings, as in a “Divine Council,” among other things.

Scholars have debated what “Elohim” means, but the language of a “Divine Council” is frequently discussed. Some see the “divine council” as something akin to polytheism (the worship of many gods) or henotheism (where there is a high god, with lower gods residing under the high god). But the use of these popular terms do not reflect how the earliest Christians thought of the “Divine Council,” as grounded in the thought of Second Temple Judaism, the next topic covered by Father Stephen De Young, Eastern Orthodox priest and author of The Religion of the Apostles: Orthodox Christianity in the First Century.

Readers unfamiliar with or suspicious of “Divine Council” theology might not be convinced as to what Stephen De Young teaches, but it is worth giving a hearing to the Scriptural evidence, and how it was received by the early church. A common idea in certain streams of historical critical scholarship today says that the “divine council” represents part of the evolutionary development of Israelite religion, beginning with polytheism, which then morphed into henotheism, and then finally arrived at monotheism. I got my first taste of this in my Religion 101 class back in college, and it was a shocker.

Yet when faced with the challenge of these strands of historical criticism, the Divine Council theology of the early church as described in De Young’s The Religion of the Apostles ironically provides the best apologetic for historic orthodox faith: Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox alike. As Stephen De Young impacts it, the story of Divine Council theology is profound.

 

The Religion of the Apostles, by Stephen De Young, shows how the beliefs and practices of the early church connect with the world of Second Temple Judaism, the historical context for Jesus of Nazareth and the New Testament.

 

The Divine Council as Understood By the Early Church

Stephen De Young engages the biblical evidence for a divine council in the New Testament, a topic that will be readily familiar to readers of the late Michael Heiser’s works (see Veracity review of Heiser’s The Unseen Realm). We encounter such a divine council in the language of the “heavenly host,” like we read about in Revelation 4:1-11 and in the birth narrative of Jesus in Luke 2:13.

Throughout the New Testament, ideas like John’s “heavenly host,” or even Paul’s use of “powers” to be defeated (1 Corinthians 15:24-25) and those in “heaven” who will bow before Jesus (Philippians 2:10-11), indicate that the New Testament writers are not actually strict monotheists, believing that only one “God” even exists. Rather, there is a multiplicity of created divine beings, some in obedience to the uncreated God (Yahweh) and others in rebellion to that God.

In the Book of Revelation, as elsewhere in the Old Testament (like Isaiah 14:13), the “mountain of assembly” is not associated with any one particular mountain in Israel, but it is the place where Yahweh dwells, with his “divine council” surrounding him. In Hebrew, this “mountain of assembly” is known as “har moed,” which is transliterated into Greek in the Book of Revelation as “harmageddon,” known to most English readers as “armageddon.” ‘Saint John’s reference in Revelation 16:16 frames the final siege of God’s holy mountain in terms reminiscent of the first such siege, when the Amalekites assaulted Israel at the foot of Mount Sinai and dared lay “a hand on the throne of Yahweh”’ (Ex. 17:16; De Young, p, 83). This connection is often missed by those fascinated by so-called “End Times” prophecies.

The “Most High God” is another key term associated with the Divine Council, which identifies the uncreated Yahweh as presiding over other created “gods”. Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 both show challenges to Yahweh as the “Most High God.” We see this language echoed in the New Testament where angels and demons refer to God as the “Most High God” (Mark 5:7; Luke 1:32, 35, 76; 8:28; Acts 16:17; De Young, p. 83).

Psalm 82 is cited as a central Old Testament passage showing how Yahweh presides over other divine beings, members of the Divine Council. The terminology of “gods” is used to reference these divine beings that make up these members of the Divine Council. De Young notes that “the final verse of this psalm is sung in the Orthodox Church on Holy Saturday to celebrate the victory of Christ over the dark powers and the beginning of God’s inheritance of all the nations” (De Young, pp. 86ff).

Correcting Misunderstandings About Satan, and the “Three Falls” of the Old Testament

De Young corrects a lot of misunderstanding about the identity of “Satan,” much as Michael Heiser has done, though Heiser and De Young differ on some of the details (De Young, pp. 113ff, and pp. 131ff). Like Heiser, De Young essentially follows the Enochian interpretation of Genesis 6:1-4, which describes a great rebellion among certain members of the Divine Council, leading to the progeny of the Nephilim. 1 Enoch and other documents recovered from the Dead Sea Scrolls identify these “Nephilim” as “giants,” overlapping with the Babylonian tradition of the apkallu. The Goliath of the famous “David and Goliath” story is known as one of these giants, as well as the stories about the “Anakim,” encountered during Israel’s desert wanderings and even into the period of the Israelites settlement in the land of Canaan (De Young, pp. 108ff).

Again, much as to what readers of Michael Heiser will know, there are not one, but rather three separate “falls” that have brought havoc among humans. In addition to Adam’s fall in Genesis 3, we have the “sons of God” having sexual relations with the “daughters of men” in Genesis 6, and finally the Tower of Babel incident in Genesis 10-11 (De Young, pp. 102ff).

It is important to note that while Christians believe that the Apostle Paul articulates the Christian understanding that the root of the human sin problem goes back to Adam (Romans 5), Paul was not the first nor the only Jewish thinker of his day to articulate this. Other authors associated with Second Temple Jewish tradition said pretty much the same thing:

O Adam, what have you done? For though it was you who sinned, the fall was not yours alone, but ours also who are your descendants.  (4 Ezra 7.118).

For, although Adam sinned first and has brought death upon all who were not in his own time, yet each of them has been born from him has prepared for himself the coming torment.  (2 Baruch 54.15).

De Young follows the Eastern Orthodox theological tradition which emphasizes that the sin of Adam is what led to human mortality, and thus enabling human corruption (De Young, p. 103). De Young summarizes that each of the three falls result in three different problematic consequences; namely, first death, secondly sin, and thirdly the dark principalities and powers, respectively (De Young, p. 104). In turn, the New Testament tells of how God dealt with each of these three problems, through the coming of the Messiah Jesus. First, Jesus conquered death (1 Corinthians 15). Secondly, Jesus purified and cleansed us from sin and corruption, applied through baptism (1 Peter 3:20-21). Thirdly, Jesus defeated the dark principalities and powers, the completion of Christ’s work (Acts 1:1; De Young, p. 106).

As a result, Stephen De Young argues that Saint Augustine led the Christian West to depart from this trifold schematic of Christ’s saving work, when he rejected the Enochian interpretation of Genesis 6:1-14 as being about an angelic rebellion. As a result, the Christian West has tended to front load all of humanity’s problems on the sin of Adam at its very root, thereby neglecting what Genesis also teaches in the stories of sons of God having children with the daughters of men, and the story of the Tower of Babel (De Young, p. 121).

De Young dedicates a chapter describing the “saints in glory,” essentially associating the Eastern Orthodox view of salvation, or “theosis,” with the Second Temple Jewish tradition of the Divine Council, arguing that redeemed humanity will be brought to participate in God’s Divine Council. This argument is grounded in the Old Testament examples of Enoch and Elijah:

‘Therefore the notion that Enoch “went to heaven without dying” is misleading, because those who died in the Old Covenant were not seen to “go to heaven” at all. Enoch, rather, was chosen by God to join the divine council as the Prophet Elijah (also known in the Orthodox Church as St. Elias) later would’ (De Young, p. 142)

As other scholars have argued, the traditional interpretation of New Testament believers in Christ as “saints” tends to obfuscate the real meaning of the Greek. Instead, the English “saints” should probably be better translated as “holy ones” (De Young, p. 145). This signifies that believers in Christ will be drawn into fellowship with the Triune God, along with the faithful members of God’s Divine Council.

Becoming Partakers of the Divine Nature: Sanctification in the Early Church

Reading The Religion of the Apostles will help evangelical Protestants who feel squeamish about the Eastern Orthodox view of sanctification, expressed in the language of “theosis.” The theological term “theosis” is often put in quotes as there is just a natural aversion to using the word “god” (in Greek, “theos”) to refer to anything other than Yahweh, the God of the Bible, when it comes to the English language. At one level, this is understandable, but it does not explain why many English-speaking Christians then have little difficulty with believing in “angels.” At its most simple level, a created “god” and an “angel” can in many cases be thought of as the same thing. Nevertheless, the language can easily trip people up, as “theosis,” simply means “divine state.”

In “theosis,” the Christian believer is gradually being made more into becoming one with God, or in union with God, sometimes called the process of “deification.” Before anyone freaks out about the terminology put in quotes as “deification,” the idea is drawn from 2 Peter 1:4, whereby Peter teaches that believers “may become partakers of the divine nature.”

But once one sees in the New Testament where “son/sons of God” language is associated with the “holy ones” (or “saints”), then it becomes easier to notice that God’s desire to bring humanity into fellowship within the Divine Council flows out of this strand of Second Temple Jewish thought. While this understanding of “deification” sounds alarming to at least some Protestants, it is not so controversial once someone carefully examines the Second Temple Judaic sources, which provides the ideas that feed into our New Testament. It is important to note that this has nothing to do with the Mormon theological fantasy invented by Joseph Smith in the 19th century of man somehow becoming a “god” to rule their own planet or universe, nor is it about ideas of “deification” found in New Age theology.

A passage like John 1:12-13 illustrates what this really is:

“But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (ESV).

While the gender inclusive impulse in many contemporary Bible translations are well intended to show how “sons of God” should be understood as “children of God,” this can tend to obscure the connection between the “son of God” language of the New Testament and Divine Council theology found in the Old Testament. It would help to know that one of the primary differences between the understanding Jesus as “the” Son of God, versus Christian believers as “sons of God,” whereby Christians become partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4), is that “the” son of God, known through the incarnation of Jesus in his divinity is not a creature, whereas Christian believers are creatures, a distinction of utmost importance in the understanding of “theosis” which most Protestant critics typically miss.

In evangelical Protestant theology, the doctrine of the Christian believer’s union with Christ comes the closest to the Eastern Orthodox view of “theosis.” Stephen De Young effectively shows that this understanding of sanctification has its roots in the ancient Jewish tradition. Interestingly, even some Lutheran theologians acknowledge that Martin Luther’s ideas about sanctification mesh in well with a classic Eastern Orthodox understanding of “theosis,” though some differences between the Lutheran Protestant and Eastern Orthodox approaches to sanctification have not been fully resolved. In other words, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox understandings of sanctification are not as far apart from one another as commonly thought, but in theological discourse today some of those remaining differences are still a bridge too far to cross, at least among some.

As Saint Athanasius, the most vocal proponent of Nicene Trinitarian orthodoxy of the 4th century, put it: “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God,” in his classic work, On The Incarnation (chapter 54, sentence 3). Stripped out of its Second Temple Jewish and early church context, such a statement might come across as being Mormon in some way. Yet properly placed within its historical context, Athanasius’ statement is a good summarization of how the early apostolic leaders of the Christian movement understood sanctification, something that every Christian, whether they be evangelical Protestant, Roman Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox, would find worthy and Scripturally accurate to embrace.

The importance of this evidence from the early church, drawing on certain strands of Second Temple Judaism, can not be underemphasized. Many skeptics assume that Christianity is based on a modified form of Judaism, which itself was derived from an ancient form of pagan polytheism. In other words, the concept of a single “God” actually had its roots in a world of multiple gods, not one “God.” As noted earlier, much of modern historical criticism since the 19th century has argued that the story of the Bible is evolutionary regarding the doctrine of the divine, beginning with a kind of polytheism (many gods, all of equal status), which morphs into henotheism (one god, ruling over other gods), which then morphs into monotheism, which then in the centuries after the New Testament is transformed into trinitarianism. Much of this 19th century narrative assumes that the Old Testament Jews simply borrowed concepts of god/gods from their pagan neighbors, only to channel that theology through the sieve of Persian Zoroastrian monotheism to produce a unique brand of Jewish monotheism. Then the New Testament borrows a variety of pagan concepts to produce the doctrine of the Trinity.

In contrast, Stephen De Young’s argument is that we have Yahweh, the uncreated God, who created these other divine beings in the Divine Council, and this framework remains consistent throughout the whole Old Testament, from start to finish, and into the New Testament. In the previous blog post in this series, De Young’s argument suggests a kind of progressive revelation, an unfolding of our knowledge of God eventually leads to the disclosure of One God in Three Persons, which emerges in the early centuries of the church. The roots of the Bible are drawn from the soil of Ancient Near East Israel through Second Temple Judaism, and not some borrowing of pagan mythology. De Young’s narrative regarding the Divine Council and the doctrine of the Trinity stands in stark contrast with the evolutionary narrative which grew out of the liberal theology and historical criticism of the 19th century.

Contrary to what a number of critics today say, the theology of the Divine Council is not some invention of modern historical criticism, a Mormon theological fantasy, or even the supposed novel evangelical teaching of the late Michael Heiser. Rather the theology of the Divine Council is rooted in the religion of the apostles of the first century.

The next installment of this review of Stephen De Young’s The Religion of the Apostles will focus on the doctrine of the atonement

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