Proclaimer Blog
What is a ‘central’ truth?
All movements and cultures have stories that they tell in order to define who they are. One of those central stories for British conservative evangelicalism is the account of a meeting in Cambridge in 1919. You probably know it. A man called Norman Grubb asked, “Does the Student Christian Movement put the atoning blood of Christ central in its teaching?” After a little deliberation among SCM delegates the answer came, “Well, we acknowledge it, but not necessarily [as] central.”
This story has been recounted countless times in print and in teaching. It has served as a community-defining tale, especially among conservative evangelical Anglicans and those strongly influenced by the evangelical student movement. Its use may be waning, but it can still often be heard.
There is much in it to be very grateful for. In practice, one key slide away from biblical Christianity into liberalism has been an unwillingness to make much of the atoning blood of Christ, which usually leads in the next generation to outright rejections of anything resembling penal substitution. We must remain grateful to all those who have stood firm against such popular shifts.
However… from the perspective of nearly a century later, I think a good case can be made that we need to ask what sense has been made of the word ‘central’ in that story. More importantly, what is the right biblical sense in which the atoning blood of Christ ought to be ‘central’ to us?
In conversations with others, it seems to me that there is a growing number of evangelicals who think that we have too often taken ‘central’ in that regard to mean, “What I should talk about most strongly almost all the time when I talk about sin, Christ and salvation”, and that this can lead to biblical unbalance. Other wonderful and ‘central’ aspects of sin, Christ and salvation – the incarnation, Christ’s active obedience, the resurrection, union with Christ, adoption, definitive sanctification, among others – then only get air-time if they can be related in some subservient way to penal substitution. These truths are confessed, but not in any meaningful community-defining way.
Such evangelicals, and I am one of them, agree entirely with the brave people of 1919 against the SCM that penal substitution is indeed ‘central’. But they think that, in proper biblical perspective, it is ‘central’ not in the way that a building’s foundations are uniquely central to the edifice (take any other part of the building away and the whole thing can still stand, but take that one part away and the whole thing collapses). Instead it is ‘central’ more in the way that any individual part of a fishing net is central to the integrity of the whole (rip away any one of a number ‘central’ parts and the whole net is fatally compromised).
No proper evangelical wants to foster a generation of Christian preachers who start to sit loose in any way to the atoning blood of Jesus. But a vital and glorious Bible truth is not rightly valued if it is so asserted as to eclipse other central and related truths, and many think that such a thing has often happened in the last century in our circles.