Examining J. I. Packer’s “ What Did the Cross Achieve? The Logic of Penal Substitution ”

(Originally delivered as the Tyndale Biblical Theology Lecture, Tyndale House, Cambridge, UK, on July 17, 1973. Published in the Tyndale Bulletin, 25 (1974), pp. 1-43. Reprinted in Celebrating the Saving Work of God: The Collected Shorter Writings of J. I. Packer, Volume 1. Carlisle, UK: Paternoster Press, 1998, pp. 85-123.)

R. L. Roper

James Innell Packer recently died on July 17, 2020, exactly 47 years from the very date he publicly presented this most famous treatment of the Atonement, July 17, 1973, and five days short of his 94th birthday. This article is a tribute to his knack for simply and forcefully reiterating the dominant Evangelical-Reformed position concerning the Atonement, but takes issue with that position’s claim to be Biblical and hence with its validity. This critique, therefore, is not so much personal (although because he steadfastly identified with the position, he must bear responsibility for holding it, even if it should turn out to be contrary to the Biblical evidence) as it is principial. It does no credit to his legacy to brush over mischaracterizations and faulty logic, no matter his motive. I cannot read Dr. Packer’s mind, but I can read his words. It is to these that I must object most heartily. The residual errors need to be exposed and rooted out in order to eliminate snares for subsequent generations, lest we follow him to the brink.

My title refers to Packer’s cross wiring the New Testament explanation of the Atonement by intruding extraneous categories and alien conceptualizing. Once these are identified, at least in a preliminary way, we are better positioned to trace out plausible deleterious results in human personality and culture. To the extent that the penal substitution doctrine is wrong, we shall have to consider the penalty assessed by reality upon its infractions and how to articulate the integral truth in a pattern of sound words.

Dr. Packer has indisputably done much good throughout his long ministry on both sides of the Water, in addition to his many books and articles, both technical and popular. Here I only call attention to this one glaring misformulation (although there doubtless are more). Neither he, nor anyone else, is justified of their errors even by an otherwise unimpeachable résumé (which he would surely be the first to disclaim). Therefore, at a moment when we tend to cast a blind eye at faults because memorializing a worthy record of renown, we risk giving a free pass to insidious seeds of our descendant’s defection and demise.

Packer made a fateful but most revealing misstep by leading off this most famous article on the Atonement with a section entitled, “Mystery and Model.” He padded himself with no less than 8 ½ pages (out of 39, in the 1998 reprint I’ll be citing) of protective mystifications so as to fend off the reader’s legitimate desire for a rationally satisfactory approach to the Atonement. Naturally, he accuses of “rationalism” any who dare wish for such a “satisfaction.” But any lesser atonement simply won’t wash. His opening salvo is, in truth, but a tempest in a teapot. This whole exhibit is the swan song of penal substitution, and a bitter refrain it turns out to be, all under the delusive guise of orthodoxy—a vain protection in time of doctrinal need.

J. I. Packer at least faintly characterized Calvinistic theologians as having caved in to rationalism after Faustus Socinus rubbed their noses in the rational absurdity of a penal divine impulse at Calvary. Since then, Calvinists have continued faithfully to rationalize every absurdity that flowed from the mother doctrine of penal substitution—the “Five Points” come to mind—and to those may be added several more that many Calvinists and non-Calvinists alike agree belong in the pile. Rationalized, not exegeted rationally as the Holy Spirit requires and endorses.

It is true that Faustus Socinus’ basically correct critique of penal substitution put Calvinists especially into a tizzy, since they were its basic defenders, but this embarrassing fact need not have spun them into rationalism such as Calvinists did indeed become grossly guilty of. (In fact, via bitter irony, it was a lifelong pious Huguenot, Pierre Bayle, whom we have to thank for creating the Enlightenment’s classic Rationalism in his landmark Dictionnaire historique et critique (2 vols., 1695; 1697), by his intransigent fideism, a necessary reflex of Calvin’s soteriology.) It might have precipitated a turnabout and return to the rational, i.e., premial, approach of the New Testament documents. But it sadly did not.

Yes, it must have been exhilarating fun to make up brand new words and to juggle the old Biblical vocabulary in new ways, but that scholastic exercise, in which they had, after all, been habituated for centuries by then, led, if not actually to rationalism, yet at least to more tedious scholasticism.

To lay the guilt for this ramifying corruption of the Gospel message at the feet of Socinus is much too high a compliment. He simply doesn’t deserve the accolade for Calvinists drinking the Kool-Aid. They should have humbled themselves—perhaps they were overreacting against the vaunted “humilitas” so highly exalted during the Middle Ages as the way of preparation for salvation—and instead done the Berean routine of examining the Scriptures afresh to see whether these things were so. Or so it seems to me. For although I find it very difficult to warm up to what Socinus affirmed, especially in his unitarian doctrine of God, yet I have become enthusiastic, even zealous over his marvelous denials! He made absolute hash of Calvinistic rationalizations concerning divine punishment of the Innocent (a line of unreasoning launched by Augustine, which exploded in mid-air by Calvin’s time, and has been raining toxic Fallout over especially Western civilization ever since).

Socinus’ succeeding generations did him one better by continuously reconsidering and debating and correcting his contribution to advancing soteriology, until they eventually (I had almost mistakenly said “finally,” but no) distilled their best winnowed thoughts into the Racovian Catechism by 1680 (English translation, 1818). This is not to say it was perfect, for these Polish Brethren never considered any human document sufficiently polished to rank with Scripture (their ardently confessed ultimate guide). But for not confessing Reformation (much less Catholic) formulations as infallible enough to convict conscientious protesters (who were the true Protestants here, after all?) of death, they were routinely expatriated and slaughtered like Anabaptists, their often exceedingly excellent books—they were the premier printers of Europe—burned to ashes, from which the phoenix of an authentically reformed/reformulated doctrine of the Atonement would arise in Resurrection power after many a cleansing ordeal.

Any truly valid approach to the Atonement will commend itself as more rational than Socinus, not less. Yet Packer cannot bring himself to appeal to the authentic Biblical meaning of “mystery,” i.e., a secret now revealed. For there is truly no mystery to the Atonement since the New Testament explained it perfectly. This section is a colossal embarrassment to evangelical scholarship on the subject. Packer even had the cheek to blame Socinus for causing defenders of penal substitution, through the centuries, to slip off their own native ground and start trying to make it look rational! I blush to think of it. (I have been nurtured by the worldview perspective of the Amsterdam school of Christian philosophy, so I could hardly be accused of being a “rationalist” in any sense, unless, of course, you mean being opposed equally to irrationalism!)

When I first uncrossed my eyes many years ago and noticed right under my nose in plain Scripture the solution to the innumerable problems with penal substitution, I had literally no idea it would solve all those problems (many of which I was ignorant of at the time). However, it was very clear that it solved a few of the nettling difficulties I had been encountering all my life. The fact that what I had only—let’s be fair—re-discovered was truly “PROBLEM-FREE” (in Packer’s cheerful expression) was a discovery of further decades and many an unexpectedly victorious joust. I certainly did not aim to jettison one set of irresolvable (if historical theology demonstrates anything!) problems only to have to spuriously, tendentiously defend others in their wake.

I had no intention of inventing a problem-free doctrine of the Atonement, believe you me, after first reading Packer’s address back in 2007! Who would conceivably claim a problem-free doctrine when it was so fraught with hubris? But the solution just kept cleaning up on the messes liberally churned out by penal substitution. So this isn’t my fault!

This problem-free Atonement, I came to appreciate more and more, was God’s own invention. I confess, I was delightfully surprised that the solution was so plainly visible in human language, because I had long heard that God had a problem saying things clearly about Himself, since all He had to work with were our clumsy human metaphors. But I took pity on God and gave Him the benefit of the doubt (and there were many). Once I saw the solution, of course, I immediately blamed Him for it, because Dr. Packer had warned us how dangerous it was to imagine we had come up with any such unlikely phenomenon. I thank him belatedly for the warning. That was certainly a close shave.

Packer’s second section, “Bible and Model” (3 pages), is seriously dated. In any case, it appears to be largely beside the point relative to his divergence from the premial doctrine taught in the New Testament. Talk of “thought models” can be just so much smoke. I do heartily agree that whatever Scripture has to say is true and wholesome and ought to be trusted and obeyed. On to the main battlefront, then.

Packer’s third section, “Substitution” (7+ pages), is largely a surreptitious attempt to win concessions to the existence of “substitution” in the Bible as a prelude, of course, to his filling it with “penal” content. He declares, “Logically, the model is put together in two stages: first, the death of Christ is declared to have been substitutionary, then the substitution is characterized and given a specific frame of reference by adding the word penal” (pp. 97-98). This is disingenuous. No one would ever have discovered between the covers of a Bible the kind of substitution Packer dares to defend. Only the fervid defensiveness of penal substitution advocates made it incumbent to eisegete it into Scripture at every turn. By leading off with “Substitution” he makes it seem like he’s simply taking a baby step into the penal variety. This is a type of duplicity. If someone does something nice for another, is that a “substitutionary” deed? Such a notion makes a wax nose of Scripture, not to mention dictionaries.

Dr. Packer’s appeal to a dictionary rather than Scripture is revealing. Dictionaries don’t usually have axes to grind, theologians do. Conveniently, all he needs to do is find entries where at least one meaning of, e.g., huper or anti or “representative” or “vicarious” includes “substitution” as a legitimate option (no matter how attenuated) in order to claim that every usage of them must imply it. This could serve as a textbook example from “Elementary Logical Fallacies 101.” An obvious counter instance is 2 Cor. 5:15—”And He died for the sake of all that those who are living should by no means still be living to themselves, but to the One dying and being raised for [huper] their sakes.” Was Jesus’ resurrection “substitutionary”? Then it must mean we don’t have to be raised because he did it for us. Do I hear an “Amen!”? And if it positively does not mean such a thing here, then it does not “have to” mean substitution anywhere else either. I appeal to the authority of Scripture and a sane evangelical logic. Yet Calvinists have, in effect, “rationalized” that passage to the contrary, and to their shame.

On the other hand, is there substitution in Scripture at all? Of course there is, but never penal substitution! Obvious instances are the “ransom” (antilutron) passages. The preposition comprised in this compound stem is “anti,” which generally means “in exchange for” (so even here the idea of “substitute” would veer off the mark in many cases). A study of ransom (only three passages) and other words in that Greek root family (redeem, deliver, liberate) makes clear that Jesus was offered up in exchange for us and thereby bought us for God out of/from our “distresses,” “offenses,” “transgressions,” “sins,” “vain behavior,” “dead works,” “our enemies and all those who are hating us.” He bought us by His precious blood out of every family, tongue, land, and nation—from mankind, from the earth. He paid the ultimate price, made the supreme sacrifice, and surrendered his soul to Death. He “paid” the Grim Reaper, for Heaven’s sake, and won earth in the bargain.

Is there any more “substitution” in the Bible. You bet! The Son was the substitute on earth for His Father in Heaven. The Holy Spirit is now the substitute on earth for the Son in Heaven. And we are substitutes for both the Father and the Son in the power of the Spirit before the watching world. Or don’t you like the term “substitute” in these contexts? Neither do I. “Representative” would be preferable. And now we’re back where we started and never should have departed. But why don’t we ever hear about this very valid sort of substitution? You know the answer as well as I do: because it’s not penal, so it doesn’t make the grade. Virtually every bit of valid theological-type “substitution” we find in Scripture is of a non-penal sort, thus, except in the case of ransoming (in which instance the preposition always present is “anti” = “instead of,” “in place of,” “in exchange for”; but not “huper” = “for,” “for the sake of,” “for the benefit of,” “on behalf of”), it is more normally, naturally, and better rendered “representation.” Therefore, if any reader is seduced into acquiescing in Packer’s section on “Substitution,” they have virtually swallowed his whole can of worms, hook, line, and sinker, and are easy prey to be swallowed, in turn, by his fourth section.

“Penal Substitution” gives ample scope for Packer to pontificate; the fact that so many have found his “logic” persuasive is a backhanded argument for Rome! He would like to fend off any of the perennial charges of holding to a “crude” theory. But he has no choice. Calvin couldn’t do it, much less his epigones. (Most recently, N. T. Wright’s “The Cross and the Caricatures: a response to Robert Jenson, Jeffrey John, and a new volume entitled Pierced for Our Transgressions,” from Eastertide, 2007, sallies forth to undertake it. But even the Bishop of Durham was hard pressed to avoid that onus in his obvious pinch: trying to back off from the dubious misrepresentations in that strident new volume, while at the same time defending Steve Chalke, author of The Lost Message of Jesus (Zondervan 2003). A most instructive attempt, available at Fulcrum Forum: https://virtueonline.org/cross-and-caricatures-tom-wright.)

Here, again, Packer reverts to mystification for a couple of pages. He even highlights James Denney’s similar recoiling from the aspersions of opponents of penal substitution. The basal problem is that penal justice is not salvific. There’s no way, shape, or form it can be twisted to make it redemptive. Because it’s not. Everyone sees that except its defenders, and they’re so full of wounds from the historic battles against those using more rational weaponry that they resort to “padding” to keep insulated from getting hurt further. Not a pretty sight. They need healing. We need a big dose of healing all around.

Then come five subsections in which Packer forges his links between substitution and “Retribution,” “Solidarity,” “Mystery,” “Salvation,” and “Divine Love.” As regards the first of these: retribution and restoration are both sides of God’s justice, but only the second saves! Yet neither was present at the cross! That event was purely an instance of infernally-inspired human hatred and rage. God’s own hand of justice was not played until the resurrection. Then followed 40 years of graciousness on the repentant and mercy, patience, kindness, and longsuffering on the unrepentant, who were treasuring up divine wrath for themselves until 70 A.D., the destruction of Jerusalem, its temple, and all who had not by then bowed the knee to their divinely vindicated Savior.

Once we see this, the gossamer of Packer’s whole argument collapses. At one point he tries to commandeer what he asserts and alleges the conscience to require, namely, an exhibit of the law of retribution. His foisting off onto universal conscience his own pet theory rankles. How would he know, since Scripture does not teach it? Where is he picking up his ideas, from the street? This is street logic, not the logic of God’s Kingdom. Is that why it plays so well among nominal evangelicals? It’s time for a prophetic challenge here.

In the second subsection, on “Solidarity,” Packer struts Luther. Big boo boo. Luther’s “wonderful exchange” is an ersatz, a phony, a “substitute,” without a doubt. Such an “imputational” exchange is common coin among conservative Protestants. But it has no grounding in the proper use of “imputation” (logizo) in Scripture. The lengthy footnotes in this section (#32 & 34) are egregious, galumphing samples of Luther’s outrageous rhetorical flair. These famous passages also well illustrate how rhetoric can take over when logic is in short supply. The authentic, precious, and truly marvelous exchange transpired when The Savior gave his sinless self, soul and body, to wrongful death on our behalf (yes, and, in this technical instance of ransoming, also “instead of” us) so that we sinners might go free from death’s imperious control over us. Simple. Sound. Sane. So misunderstood!

God cured from sin by healing from death. This was the totally unexpected Divine “end run” that caught the opposite team completely off guard. And this play didn’t require a substitute player! To be sure, the Quarterback got absolutely slaughtered by his Opponent. But because “his cause was right and his heart was pure,” he made a miraculous comeback that filled his team with superabundant team spirit and high morale sufficient to win the game side by side with their Champion. Everyone took their lumps, but by following his directions and obeying his calls, they all won glory!

Subsection three is more mystery-mongering. Packer throws the veil over divine love, over the Cross’s necessity, over Christ’s solidarity with us, over our union with Him, over the Trinity, over predestination, and over the incarnation. That’s for starters. These will not strike us as “mysterious” (indeed, they do not strike the apostles as such, for they never use this or any other similar word to label them) once we understand God’s justice as restorative and therefore utterly rational. Packer doesn’t get it, so he’s aswarm with buzzing mysteries. He escapes his evident irrationality via an “upper storey leap,” à la Francis Schaeffer, into “supernature.” Observe closely:

“The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes humanity the standard for God; to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us, even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word supernatural in theology); and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it” (pp. 114-115, bold emphasis added).

Packer cannot make forward progress on this doctrine because he is too invested in defending against its detractors, so does not have the time or candor to reconfigure the whole mess, and is hardly poised to repent in the presence of those he has peremptorily labeled. He’s painted himself into a corner.

By his fourth subsection, concerning salvation, his stock assertions are getting wearisome. Yet stating his assertions over and over and over again does not make them more persuasive, only more tedious. This is improper imprinting. Even so, one of the more interesting things happens in this section, since he is forced to out with his Calvinism and it’s worthy Siamese twin, Arminianism. In fact, it helped me see something I had not noticed before: a resurrectionary re-centering of the Atonement, i.e., Divine restorative justice, will radically alter the outcome of the Arminian controversy. It follows as day does night. Packer offers this posing of the famous double-bind:

“So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else, to evade this inference, deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone; and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else, to evade this inference, restrict the scope of the substitution, making it a substitution for some, not all” (p. 116, all emphases added).

The footnote gives John Murray’s double-bind: “a limited efficacy or a limited extent; there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement” (The Atonement [Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1962] p. 27).

But what happens if we, instead of affirming penal substitution, substitute for it restorative or premial justice at Messiah’s justifying resurrection? What then? There’s a whole new world out there! For starters, a premial/restorative atonement, as distinguished from a penal atonement (need I reiterate?), is not substitutionary but overcompensatory. This means that whatever the Lord accomplished was achieved not instead of us, i.e., due to God’s penal payback for our sinfulness , but for us, i.e., due to God’s gracious premial repayment for Messiah’s sinlessness . There’s all the difference in the world between these two. It’s all about Jesus!

ERGO: THERE IS SUCH A THING AS AN UNLIMITED ATONEMENT AFTER ALL!

This is hot off the griddle, right out of the box, fresh as a newborn baby (probably needs a little cleaning up…). “Come one, come all! Buy and eat without money and without price!” This is BIG! Since Christ atoningly indemnified the whole human family without exception, but since Packer (also Murray, et al) thinks of God’s justice exclusively from its penal side , he thinks of Christ as paying for sins “in some crude sense” (Note: this is an inescapable reproach against its falsity!) as “substitute” for particular individual sins. This error compels him to calculate like a Shylock. The Resurrectionary Atonement shatters all that, once and for all, cataclysmically! The old calculus of limited atonement is passé, obsolesced, defunct, and all but bankrupt. The economics of divine compensation can only be compared with Einstein’s discovery of the almost unbelievable ratio between matter and energy represented in his famous formula. Little tiny bomb; great big boom. Why? Supercompensation. It’s etched in the bedrock of the universe.

So, for God’s sake, for Christ’s sake, let’s get over our penal fixation once and for all. There’s a whole world to win!

Now, I wish I could stop right there. But Packer goes on to probably the most problematic link of all in his fifth subpoint—the quintessence—concerning “Divine Love.” This is where penal substitution always goes limp. (I find it hard to believe its defenders really believe their own words, but certainly they cannot feel them without a measure of inauthenticity. This must seriously twist emotions, and the reflex of that can well be surmised by a glance at “Christian” history.) Here, of course, is where Packer quotes John 3:16…cuz he’s s’pozed to, as if quoting it makes everything all right. It doesn’t. Once you mess with the Biblical Proclamation in such a fundamental way, a few Bible Band-Aids only aggravate the wound and prevent deep healing. It’s insulting to have been assaulted so remorselessly by Packer’s illogic and then to get tossed a Bible verse to make the owie go away.

But Packer learned from the “best”—Leon Morris, James Denney, James Buchanan, Jonathan Edwards, Francis Turretin, John Owen, John Calvin, Philipp Melanchthon, Martin Luther. Who can fault them? Only Scripture. Only God’s Explanation is up to that task. But it shall most certainly be done. Regardless how much unctuous sentimentality suffuses these fundamental errors, errors they remain, and they remain to be exposed and rooted out. They sully the holiness of God. They impugn the justice of God. They belie the love of God. They make a mockery of the most pivotal truth of God’s entire Explanation in Scripture.

In Packer’s conclusion, “The Cross in the Bible,” He gives a summary brush over, reiterating his allegations, minimizing his critics, rehabilitating demonstrable errors, venerating unsound traditions, genuflecting before great icons of penal substitution. The whole exhibit is disgraceful.

I wish I could have been more kind. But I see the evil fruits of such false doctrine on all sides. We still see these spurious arguments echoed and reechoed in book after article after manifesto after tract after hymn after radio program after television program after film after video after website after blog, ad nauseam….

By fostering penal substitution rather than calling a timely halt to its advance, the Doctor has done great harm to the body of Christ on earth whom he practiced on. By blindly accepting this alien dogma instead of practicing due diligence as was his professional duty, Packer has been instrumental in further impairing generations of Evangelicals from apprehending the truth of the New Testament. The almost unbearable truth of this grievous statement will only dawn slowly in the minds of the few who make a habit, like the noble Bereans of old, of “examining the Scriptures day by day to see whether these have it thus” (Acts 17:11), endeavoring to present themselves to God “qualified, an unashamed worker, correctly cutting the Explanation of the truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). Jesus made increasing insight conditional: “If ever you should be remaining in my Explanation, you are truly my learners, and you will know the truth, and the truth will be liberating you” (John 8:31). We must not lazily take for granted what must be laboriously sought.

Packer’s sad delinquency, when it finally becomes evident to these few who qualify, will prove a cautionary tale of perpetual warning to future generations of the church of God on earth, lest we harden up like our Jewish forbears, who, although “salvation is of the Jews,” somehow still managed to demonstrate themselves unworthy of the holy truths and turned treasonous against the God of their ancestors, until we behold a modern Israel—a host of Holocaust survivors—treating their fellow Semites in Palestine the way Nazis treated them. They, in effect, have again become “Not-sees,” as Isaiah prophesied—likewise blinded by their stiff-necked enmity against the Son of Yahweh, and so refusing to kiss Him and live in peace with brethren. Shall we follow them to the brink as well?

This has been a tedious and only obliquely pleasurable undertaking. I find it painful partly because I am embarrassed by Packer’s claim to be an Evangelical. If his famous article is “Evangelical,” my Biblical studies and sensitivities have rendered me emphatically not. Yet Packer’s is the pack I grew up hanging around. Still, I must add that having come to realize, by the graciousness of God, what the truth about the Atonement really is, I find it hard to hold a grudge against Packer or any other penal substitution adherent. I’m confident that whenever even his most loyal students and readers and admirers determine to know the truth of Christ as it is in Scripture, they too will rejoice and leave their customary mistakes behind. That’s what I ache for. That’s what I yearn to see. That’s what I’m praying for.

Dr. Packer is not responsible for creating the penal substitution dogma he defends in this famous piece. He is responsible for perpetuating it. He was serving as its defense attorney. He assumed the same role that Jay Sekulow did from January 16th through February 5th: defending the indefensible. We beheld Adam Schiff setting the record straight again, and again, and again. But Jay Sekulow had long before been prepared for his opposing role in that courtroom drama, for in his youth he had been converted from his Jewish heritage to a penal-substitution-believing Evangelical through the instrumentality of Jews for Jesus, which accepted that dominant view of the Atonement, so had already been well instructed in a gigantic falsehood.

Herein I have hoped to make a beginning at unlacing the pervasive lie he teethed on and, in turn, to put some teeth back into the truth he never knew. He represents every Evangelical whose conscience has been darkened by the penal substitution doctrine of the Atonement. Only by liberating the American Evangelical and conservative Protestant populations from that religious delusion can this nation hope to remove the veil that is keeping it blind to its affiliated social-economic-political-moral lies that are even now tightening their chokehold on the United States of America. However, these lies are deeply embedded in the theological lie about the Atonement.

I have some personal interest in this matter since I knew Marty “Moishe” Rosen, founder of Jews for Jesus, and, more interestingly, Arnie Bernstein, his early closest associate, who is actually responsible for giving the name “Jews for Jesus” to the movement. Now Rev. A. James Bernstein, a minister within Eastern Orthodoxy, he was eventually persuaded to an understanding of both sin and the Atonement that is much more compatible with the premial teaching of the New Testament, indeed, of the whole Bible properly interpreted. He well summarizes these in an interesting autobiographical presentation he gave on June 19, 2009: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrK27w-gQvY. He expands on these doctrinal matters in his published autobiography, Surprised by Christ: My Journey from Judaism to Orthodox Christianity (2008), https://www.amazon.com/Surprised-Christ-Bernstein-James-Paperback/dp/B00NPNWW9Q/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=bernstein%2C+surprised+by+christ&qid=1598577084&s=books&sr=1-2. On other matters, we may agree to disagree. But concerning sin and the Atonement, I commend these articulations as superior to those of J. I. Packer. Come, let us reason together.