John Mark Reynolds has a good obituary of the recently deceased New Testament scholar Leon Morris. Reynolds writes:
“It seems like every five years or so the church goes through another wave of criticism in which influential pastors, Bible scholars, or theologians breathlessly announce that they’ve looked into the matter and discovered that the death of Christ isn’t the main thing after all. The most recent such outbreak was messily entangled with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, and featured movie reviews which started by critiquing the movie (fair enough) but soon enough devolved into dismissals of the centrality of Christ’s crucifixion for the Christian faith. These demotions of the cross always bring out the latent fundamentalist in me, who it turns out is always hiding just under the urbane theological veneer, humming “The Old Rugged Cross” and hearing the echo of a prophetic sermon in the Foursquare Church of my upbringing in the seventies: ‘Just wait and see,’ warned the preacher, ‘they’ll find a way to take the blood out of the Bible. The devil can’t stand that blood.’ Don’t get me started. Instead, get Leon Morris started. “
Reynolds’s boyhood pastor had it right, as did the “Old Rugged Cross” and Leon Morris. This is especially clear in an era when all about us so-called “evangelicals” are embarassed by the blood of Jesus, calling for a “non-violent atonement” or a “more nuanced view of the work of Christ.”
Thank God for Leon Morris’s life. And, if you don’t have it, read Morris’s magnificent book, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross.
With Morris’s passing, I am all the more thankful for courageous New Testament scholars such as my next-door neighbor, friend, and colleague, Thomas R. Schreiner, who argues consistently and boldly for penal substitutionary atonement. Let’s pray that God will give us an army of evangelistic scholars who understand that the most profound mystery of the universe can be summed up by the answered question: “What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.”
