here.

I have become tired of having people assume that I care less about my beliefs simply because I try to treat theirs with respect…It’s an odd reaction, but it is one I have encountered.

I would still explain this as a paradigm problem. I think that if you want to be a witness to people with very fixed views, then you just have to put up with the remarks about how you don’t believe. I find it painful too and it often feels quite hurtful. But I remind myself that people really do believe that I really don’t believe and that, consequently, I shouldn’t be hurt by being told that I don’t believe. But I hear you.

It’s an odd reaction, but it is one I have encountered.

I write from a perspective of having rejected PSA myself as untenable and spent a long time researching other options within Christianity. I have for years attempted to convince PSA advocates of the problems with their system, but met with almost complete failure.

But the more I gain knowledge myself in my own academic studies in theology, the more I think “man, if those guys knew the half of it, they wouldn’t advocate PS in the way they do.” So increasingly I have come to the view that trying to criticize to them is of little assistance (especially as it often leads to them getting defensive and becoming more sure of it), and trying to share a wider knowledge and understanding with them has to be the way to go.

But at the end of the day, I have to remind myself that I cannot control what others believe. I could do everything right in terms of my method, and at the end of the day they could still choose to reject everything I say, because it’s up to them.

Andrew, for several years I attended a church that was a mile away from Oak Hill College (‘home’ of the authors of PFOT). I sat in the pew as a moderate, orthodox Christian and constantly heard my beliefs denounced as unbelieving and heretical. (For explanatory purposes, I began attending this particular church because it was my parish church at the time.)

If you can tell me how to have such a conversation with people, I’m seriously all ears. Individuals were prepared to have friendships with me and to take me seriously as a ‘lost seeker after God’ but they were not prepared to see me as a Christian sister.

I say this not in bitterness but rather to communicate that individuals were taking me as seriously and as respectfully as they were able to do, yet to my knowledge my Christian witness had no influence on them whatsoever other than their prayers that I would eventually accept Jesus as my Lord and saviour.

From where I sit, it wasn’t a failure to establish a relationship nor a failure to witness but a failure to communicate across paradigms. Personal guilt and blame are ‘how things are’ in their perspective and it’s difficult and impossible to communicate a different perspective, in my experience. At least not without the power of the Spirit.

That’s why I’ve come to realize that best way to help these people is not by trying to criticize PSA and cut the limb they’re sitting on out from under them, but to help them expand their knowledge.

Well, I’d love to hear how you do that. I’m not speaking sarcastically; I’m speaking seriously. I’d genuinely like to hear so that I can start learning how to do so too.

I do think there is an importance in making positive presentations, but there is also a value in pointing out the negative consequences of placing PSA in the center. Similar problems will occur, I believe, with any metaphor that is elevated to the status of exclusive reality; the result is imbalance.

There is also, however, the simple problem of getting people to read or hear presentations of the other side.

We must not abandon the notion of PSA; it does express an important aspect of atonement, but the problem is when it becomes the central notion to the exclusion of the others.

I agree with you wholeheartedly here. I believe there is great value in PSA, especially, but not exclusively, in communicating forgiveness and remission of the penalty. Those are good things.

I took Exegesis of Romans in college from a professor who taught moral influence, a view with which I have much sympathy, but he had made moral influence the center of the doctrine of the atonement, and re-read Romans in order to work that way.

It was an oddly disorienting kind of experience!

Well, the reason I read your blog regularly is to be constantly challenged by the more conservative view of things. If you find time to respond at some point, I’ll certainly read your response with care.