Leon Morris - The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross

Leon Morris's work is of ongoing service to evangelical theology, though he wrote his best stuff in the 1960s or even earlier. Meticulous, diligent, unpolemical, he was not cowed by the latest scholarly opinion delivered down from on great height by the likes of C.H. Dodd and co, but rather got to work again on the text of scripture: what does it actually say? In The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross (1955) he insisted that the biblical metaphor of 'blood' was more often used in reference to violent death than to 'life' (as had been suggested). He defended the idea of propitiation 'because there is a tendency to think that those scholars who have equated the Greek term with expiation have said the last word...the Bible has a great deal to say about the wrath of God, and ...it leaves us in no doubt as to the fact that, although God is a God of love, yet He does not regard sin complacently, as something which does not matter greatly. On the contrary, sin calls forth the implacable hostility of His holy nature, and until something is done about it this puts the sinner in an unenviable position...' (p. 277) Furthermore, he defends the idea of substitution as thoroughly biblical and demanded by the major biblical atonement metaphor. Substitution when we speak of Christ's death, as Morris puts it, 'is not the substitution of a casual stranger, but of one who stands in the closest possible relationship with those for whom He died.' (p. 279)