The subject of redemption has been coming up a lot in my reading and in my thoughts as of late, and I have been meaning to write a few things here about it. Time is not on my side right now, though, and so I will wait until 2009 to get into this in more detail. What my thinking on redemption amounts to so far is essentially that our common conception of redemption falls far short of what Scripture teaches.

To lead into this, I wanted to quote a piece from J. I. Packer, taken out of the introductory essay he wrote for John Owen's treatise on redemption, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ. I find his comments helpful as a springboard for discussing redemption and the message of the gospel, as he argues also that the Church has largely obscured the true meaning of redemption. Packer says,

[We have] lost our grip on the biblical gospel. Without realising it, we have during the past century bartered that gospel for a substitute product which, though it looks similar enough in points of detail, is as a whole a decidedly different thing. Hence our troubles; for the substitute product does not answer the ends for which the authentic gospel has in past days proved so mighty. The new gospel conspicuously fails to produce deep reverence, deep repentance, deep humility, a spirit of worship, a concern for the church. Why?...It fails to make men God-centred in their thoughts and God-fearing in their hearts because this is not primarily what it is trying to do. One way of stating the difference between it and the old gospel is to say that it is too exclusively concerned to be 'helpful' to man—to bring peace, comfort, happiness, satisfaction—and too little concerned to glorify God. The old gospel was 'helpful,' too—more so, indeed, than is the new—but (so to speak) incidentally, for its first concern was always to give glory to God. It was always and essentially a proclamation of Divine sovereignty in mercy and judgment, a summons to bow down and worship the might Lord on whom man depends for all good, both in nature and in grace. Its centre of reference was unambiguously God. But in the new gospel the centre of reference is man. This is just to say that the old gospel was religious in a way that the new gospel is not. Whereas the chief aim of the old was to teach men to worship God, the concern of the new seems limited to making them feel better. The subject of the old gospel was God and His ways with men; the subject of the new is man and the help God gives him. There is a world of difference. The whole perspective and emphasis of gospel preaching has changed.

Packer is clearly referring both to modern evangelicalism and mainline liberalism here, and I think he is quite accurate in his assessment. The Church in many respects has lost its grasp on the holistic and biblical understanding of redemption. As I read more on this I will have some further thoughts to post in coming weeks. For now, your thoughts?