We have received many letters in response to the exchange between Robert Gundry and Thomas Oden on "The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evangelical Celebration." That exchange began with a critique by Gundry in the January/February issue, continued with an exchange between Oden and Gundry in the March/April issue, and concluded with Oden's response to critics of "Celebration" in the May/June issue (a longer version of which is available here on our Web site). Following is a representative selection of responses from our readers. Many thanks to all who have taken the time to think through these matters and write.

My first reading of the Gundry response to "Celebration" and his articulation of what I considered to be several significant and well–considered questions left me with a strong appetite for the inevitable response which would follow. Desperate for well–articulated debate I thought here for once was an opportunity for the evangelical community to engage in a rigorous examination of fundamental concepts.

Count me in the utterly disappointed category having read Thomas Oden's "Calm Response," which I found completely lacking in both calm and response. According to whose set of rules does a questioner get labeled as a critic? Did not Gundry demonstrate his own fundamental allegiance with the broad intention of the document? Did he not verbalize his own concern about the possible interpretation that he was being overly "picky" in raising some of his concerns? For this he gets marginalized for daring to examine rigorously the perhaps unintended consequences and possible errors of the document.

Quite apart form the tone, Oden did not even offer up an exegetical response to Gundry on the key question of Righteousness. Instead he tries to fend off Gundry with a list of the signers, as if their assent to the document determines its truth. At the same time, he deflects the question with his interpretation of how Calvin and Arminius are actually aligned on the issue, such that Wesley himself attests to the core elements of what "Celebration" proposes.

My response to Thomas Oden would be threefold. First, he demonstrates once again that we are not yet ready to engage in real debate on core questions. This is tragic. Second, he trivializes the concept of sola scriptura by offering up Calvin and Wesley rather than addressing and perhaps even demonstrating where Gundry may be in error. Finally, through his dependence on the cloud of witnesses who support "Celebration," he leads me to conclude that truth can be reduced to a numbers game or perhaps the academic equivalent of "my dad's bigger than your dad."

In the end I am still waiting for a response to Gundry. If Oden can't or won't answer the question, hand the pen to someone who will. If the question does indeed call us to look again at the evidence and affirm or revise our theology, so be it. Waiting for a real response.

J. Roger Laing

Aberdeen, Scotland

Robert Gundry is either being disingenuous or very naive when he writes, "does Oden not allow that contemporary exegesis may correct an aspect of classic Protestant teaching on justification just as that teaching corrected an aspect of classic Roman Catholic teaching on justification?" For the sake of remaining charitable, I have to assume that it is the latter that is the case. Certainly, it is more than naive to suggest that a positive imputation of Christ's righteousness constituted only an aspect of the classic Protestant teaching on justification. It was the insistence on the positive imputation of Christ's righteousness which made Protestantism to be a revolution against the Catholic doctrine (and not merely a correction of an aspect of it).

Admittedly, this understanding did not emerge overnight. It required the Osiandrian controversy in the early 1550s to bring final clarity into the confessional position on justification affirmed by Protestantism. But once that clarity was achieved (through sweat, blood and tears), it remained the defining doctrine which gave to the Protestant Reformation its character as Protestant. Reading Gundry, it becomes quite understandable why so many Protestants today have become Catholic in their understanding of justification. For all too many, this entire sixteenth–century debate was about nothing more than a modest correction of an aspect of Catholic teaching. If that were true, there would be no reason not to return to Rome. Robert Gundry has already taken the most decisive step.

Bruce L. McCormack

Weyerhaeuser Professor of Systematic Theology

Princeton Theological Seminary

Princeton, N.J.

Congratulations to B&C for the courage of faith to publish the spirited exchange between Robert Gundry and Thomas Oden. For this ordinary reader, patient perusal of its unplain scholar talk was worth it. I take as their agreed objective, not to split hairs over the gospel. They are evidently not convinced, however, of each other's desire not to split its heirs. At points their debate was almost palpably frosty. Nevertheless, it succeeded, prompting me to download "The Gospel of Jesus Christ" for myself and my family. I offer these comments on the trigger of this apologetic cold snap, Christ's righteousness.

First, that believers possess Christ's righteousness can be stated by the simple gospel logic: the justified have God's righteousness; Christ is God; therefore the justified have Christ's righteousness. Argument about whose righteousness the justified have, Christ's or God's, is pointless, unless one intends to qualify or take issue with the central statement, Christ is God. Christ himself credited his works and words to the Father. He did not distinguish his righteousness from his Father's. They were one in word and deed and essence.

Then, the compartmentalization of Christ's life and death into active and passive obedience, respectively, misconceives the unbroken continuum of his subservient will. Thomas à; Kempis said Christ's entire life was a cross. And in a sense the cross was his entire life. His obedience knew no distinct phases corresponding to active and passive. Believers must be heir to all his righteousness in life and death or none of it, because it canot be divided without harm. There's something redolent of wise King Solomon and a certain baby in this.

Finally, the mystical transformation at salvation that positions Christians in Christ and he in them, declares him more than a removed third–party payer or surrogate sufferer. We have become his earthly body and temple and he our resident high priest. Can it be he is present in us without his righteousness imputed to us? How odd and contradictory that would seem. It would be as if a rich suitor, having sacrificed all he possessed to win his beloved, refused her his good, hard–earned name. Astonishingly, our relationship with Christ is likened to a husband and wife, a metaphor that seems designed both to communicate the New Covenant and to provide a tool, an "intimacy factor," for its exegesis.

Dr. Bruce Jespersen

Calgary, Alberta

Canada

All the exegetical debate on this exchange about whether Christ's righteous life is savingly imputed to his people has centered on the New Testament epistles. I think two episodes from the synoptic gospels can shed light on this matter.

The first is Christ's baptism where his public ministry began by his being baptized for the repentance of sin. Since the New Testament is uniform in its insistence that Jesus was sinless and John the Baptist is shown to sense this in his reluctance to baptize Jesus, then how can Jesus be baptized for sin he never committed? The answer, of course, is that Jesus was not being baptized for his own sins but ours. He began his public ministry by radically identifying himself with sinners stating his intention to become one with us so that he might covenantally represent us before God for our salvation. His baptism is then a foreshadowing of the cross, where his determination to become one with sinners reaches its zenith in his being crucified for our sins. Jesus himself confirms this exegesis by later asking his disciples if they can "be baptized with the baptism he is baptized with," referring to his impending death. The shadow of the cross fell across Jesus from the moment he began his ministry.

But what happens immediately after his baptism, where he radically identifies himself with sinners? Does he go to the cross? No, he goes out into the wilderness where he is tempted by the devil for 40 days. Many have pointed out the parallels with Israel's 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. But whereas Israel failed the test and succumbed to the devil's temptations, Jesus triumphs over Satan fending off the devil's attacks with Scriptures used to describe Israel's wilderness experience in the book of Deuteronomy. Many have concluded that Jesus is declaring himself to the new Israel, a son of God that will be covenantally faithful to his Father.

My point is this: when Jesus declares his intention to radically identify himself with sinners, he does not immediately go to the cross but replicates in his life events in the typological life of Israel which at this point represents all sinners in their failures to keep God's covenant law. But by contrast, where Israel broke the covenant, Jesus perfectly kept it. Are not the gospel writers trying to teach us that part of Jesus' radical identification with sinners involves his living the righteous life for us that we have failed to live? He established a saving covenant with God for us sinners that does not only include his atoning death for our sins but also his righteous life as a covenant keeper. Our sins are forgiven by his blood poured out upon the cross and our lives are eternally hidden within the righteousness of his perfect covenant–keeping.

Professor Gundry stated that his objection to the imputed righteousness of Christ as a means of our salvation had to do with his disagreement with the doctrine that Christ had to fulfill the Old Testament covenants for us. Regardless of how the word "imputation" is used in the epistles, I believe the gospels uniformly testify that that is exactly what Christ had to do for us in order for us to be saved. All the Old Testament covenants are taken up into his life, but whereas we as a race failed to keep those covenants, he fulfilled them all perfectly that our sinful lives may be hidden in his righteous one as he represents us before God the Father.

Curt Gardner

Berea, Ky.

I was most disheartened by Thomas Oden's "Calm Answer" to Robert Gundry's critique of "An Evangelical Celebration." Oden dismissed Gundry's exegetical argument against Christ's imputed righteousness like an old schoolmaster scolding an errant student who had the importunity to dare ask "why?" The response was not a well–reasoned argument which dealt with the Scriptures, but instead a mere, "Tut–tut, my boy, we can't have you asking questions like that! Such impertinence! You'll upset the Traditions our Grand Institution!"

Oden substituted bluster for reason, which is always an indication there is something to hide. The circled wagons of Protestant thought are a chief sign that the tradition is losing its vitality. We need nothing less than a new Reformation. Protestants do not have the luxury of appealing to a magisterium, the Tradition, or a pope. It is against our ecclesiology to do what Oden has done. We have but one recourse—the Word of God. Gundry's challenge is to examine what we have accepted according to the light of that Word, but Oden prefers to cling to familiar traditions like old wineskins, cherishing the memory's savor, not realizing the present contents have soured to vinegar with age.

Jefferis Kent Peterson

www.scholarscorner.com

Thomas Oden's remarks on the "social location" of the critics of "An Evangelical Celebration" are quite amusing. He has constructed a neat dilemma for his opponents: If they maintain their criticisms, they are succumbing to the pressures of the liberal academy, whereas if they agree with him in supporting "Celebration" they are showing commendable courage. Oden himself has indeed shown magnificent defiance in repudiating the liberalism of his own tradition and becoming uncompromisingly orthodox. But his own social location, in a very liberal seminary of a liberal denomination, is far from that of most evangelicals. And he consistently underestimates the enormous pressures for conformity, and against criticism, in many evengelical circles.

In such circles, what takes courage is to resist being intimidated by the parade of names Oden marshalls in order to silence the critics! But some critics are pretty much immune from any kind of intimidation. Anyone who knows Nicholas Wolterstorff will find laughable Oden's implied characterization of him as a conformist, meekly surrendering to the demands of his colleagues at Yale Divinity School! Oden needs to repent his attribution of unworthy motives to his opponents, and conduct the debate on its merits.

William Hasker

Huntington College

Huntington, Ind.

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