Quotable

David Yeago on the atonement as preached today:

"The gospel thus preached is invariably a gospel of affirmation, not transformation. It reassures us but does not make anything happen. The cross of Jesus is proclaimed as the token of our assurance that God is with us “no matter what,” a divine presence that enables us to cope with things as they are but does not change anything and therefore in the end reconciles us to things as they are. We have no plausible exegesis of Paul’s audacious pronouncement: “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” We tend rather to say: “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new interpretation: everything remains the same, but we feel quite differently about it.”"