Imagine being completely ignorant of an entire field of human knowledge, reading around it for a week or so, and then producing the most embarrassingly incoherent, rambling screed imaginable that demonstrates your absolute lack of mastery of the subject in question. That is precisely what Matthew Parris has done in his shamefully stupid article in The Spectator, “The problem with St Paul”. 

He concludes that article with the suggestion that Christians “face up” to the shocking fact he thinks he has uniquely demonstrated, which is that “the whole atonement thing is a terrible muddle”. The only thing demonstrated by this article is that a terrible muddle exists within Matthew Parris’s mind when he tries to access the part of it that relates to theology and biblical studies.

This kind of arrogance is par for the course for public figures who consider themselves intellectuals and decide to take on the claims of Christianity. They don’t bother to check with anyone who knows what they are talking about as to whether their arguments are capable of destroying at a single stroke the oldest intellectual tradition in the western world. Let me save you the suspense: Parris is not equal to the task, not even close. In fact, you might even say that he is not equal to the task of writing in grammatically coherent sentences.

Christ’s teachings are, of course, cryptic and not always explicit

The logical flow of the article is not clear, but let me point to a few problems. In saying this, I admit that I too am not an expert, holding a mere MA in Biblical Studies and a Doctorate in Systematic Theology. But I know more than Matthew Parris.

To begin, he claims early on that the Apostle Paul “invented the Church’s teaching about redemption on the cross”. Throughout the article he conflates numerous terms which don’t mean the same thing such as “redemption”, “atonement”, “propitiation”, “sacrifice”, “Christ’s death” and so on. Leaving that aside, by this assertion he means that the Apostle Paul came up with the idea that Christ’s death on the cross was an atonement for human sin. Parris seems blissfully unaware that the theory of atonement that he articulates and which he attributes to the Apostle Paul is one of several ways that the atonement has been understood throughout Church history. In this case, it is often called penal substitutionary atonement. So it is not even clear what he is saying has been made up by Paul: is it penal substitutionary atonement, or is it the more general idea that the cross is redemptive and that by it Christ has removed our sins from us? 

I’m rushing ahead. He gets to that point only after the following passage: “Where does the doctrine of the atonement through Christ’s crucifixion find its roots? To my great surprise I find no anchorage for the teaching in anything we believe Jesus said.”

Again, it is not clear what Matthew Parris means by “the doctrine of the atonement”, but anybody who knows the first thing about this subject knows that there are multiple sayings of Christ which are commonly taken to refer to the atonement. “The son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28). “This is my blood of the new covenant, which is poured out for many for the remission of sins” (Matthew 26:28). There are many others. 

Christ’s teachings are, of course, cryptic and not always explicit. It was for the Apostles who followed him and who wrote the New Testament to understand more gradually the significance of his death and its meaning for human redemption. The Apostles came to this understanding not just by meditation upon the sayings of Christ, but through rereading the Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament) in light of the life, death and resurrection of Christ. Again, this is not limited to the Apostle Paul. 

The First Letter of the Apostle Peter, for example, explicitly references the Prophet Isaiah, chapter 53. In that passage (written centuries before the crucifixion), a mysterious servant of the Lord is said to be stricken by God, afflicted and “wounded for our transgressions”. It continues: “he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:4-6). The Apostle Peter interprets this passage as referring to Jesus Christ and explicitly links it to the events of the crucifixion (1 Peter 2:21-25). This is just one example of apostolic writings outside of the Pauline corpus that do such things.

His handling of Austin Farrer towards the end of the article is comical

One could go on. Suffice to say that the traditional Christian view of the atonement is that it was foreshadowed in the Hebrew Scriptures through the prophets and the ritual sacrifices of the Mosaic covenant, that it was spoken about by Christ albeit in a way which was not fully comprehended by his first listeners, and then it was explicated and taught by the Apostles who codified it to some extent in the writings of the New Testament. The writers of the New Testament only took this so far, and it was for other theologians to think more broadly about how the atonement worked to effect salvation. We have theories of the atonement, such as penal substitutionary atonement, the victory of Christ over the cosmic powers of darkness (often called the Christus Victor model), the satisfaction theory associated with St Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo?, the Abelardian view that the cross was a magnificent display of the love of God and a call to repentance, and the ransom theory — which was commonly held in the Church during the period of the Patristic Fathers and finds some purchase in the saying of Christ, mentioned above, that his life was given as “a ransom for many”. 

Matthew Parris doesn’t understand any of this. He has no comprehension of the theological claims that he is critiquing. His handling of Austin Farrer towards the end of the article is comical. I don’t know which Austin Farrer work he is referencing, but I can guarantee you that Austin Farrer would wipe the floor in a debate on the atonement with Matthew Parris. Parris quotes a position that Farrer explicitly rejects (presumably because Farrer is wary of making the atonement sound like a financial transaction). Parris then says that this is in fact what Christians believe and then attempts to critique it. It is not even clear what his critique is, only that the idea of paying God (or the gods) for sin has roots in the human unconscious and in other cultures apart from Jewish or Christian ones. So what?

He then brings up fleetingly the ransom theory of the atonement and ridicules the idea that the atonement was a ransom paid to the Devil by God. Then he starts talking about propitiation again, which is not the same thing. Then he asks whether we are redeemed forever or whether we can run up further debt (again, mixing up his metaphors and abruptly changing the subject).

Then he says that it’s all a muddle. It’s only a muddle because you’ve made it a muddle, Matthew, and the only language here that’s “impossible to understand” (as you accuse the language of faith of being) is your grammatically incorrect syntax and your incoherent argumentation.

Please stop now before you make yourself look truly ridiculous.