Interview with Mr. (Rev. Prof.) Lee Gatiss: "Limited Atonement"

Limited Atonement — An interview with Lee Gatiss (part 1)

 Oct 8, 2013   

       

I (Lucas Bradburn) had the pleasure recently of interviewing Lee Gatiss, Director of Church Society and Editor of The NIV Proclamation Bible (Hodder). Lee is also Review Editor of the journal Churchman, and Series Editor of The Reformed Evangelical Anglican Library. He has studied history and theology at Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia), and trained for Anglican ministry at Oak Hill (London). He has served in several Anglican churches including St Helen’s, Bishopsgate and the Church Society Trust parish of St Botolph’s, Barton Seagrave. Lee is also Adjunct Lecturer in Church History at Wales Evangelical School of Theology and the author of many books, articles, and reviews. One of his most recent books is For Us and Our Salvation: ‘Limited Atonement’ in the Bible, Doctrine, History, and Ministry.

 

In your new book, For Us and Our Salvation, you note that you are doing doctoral work on John Owen. What exactly are you writing on? How has Owen most influenced you? Was he the inspiration for your book?

My PhD, just submitted, is on Owen’s Hebrews commentary, which at 2 million words in length is more than twice as long as the whole Bible. So that has kept me busy, as you might expect! I’ve looked at his major interlocutors and sources, e.g. Socinians (anti-Trinitarians), his use of Jewish material such as Targums and Talmuds, his covenant theology, and his interaction with Roman Catholic exegesis. Post-Reformation exegesis has a bad reputation, but I think Owen has a lot to offer and the reputation is unfair.

I know it might be surprising to some, but no, Owen was not the inspiration for my book on limited atonement, which I’ve tinkered away at for about 15 years. Nor did I come to his commentary because of his doctrine of the cross. I wanted to do research which enabled me to use the Greek and Hebrew I was taught at seminary, but which integrated that somehow with doctrine and history (my undergraduate major at Oxford). Studying an old commentary (I mean, “historical exegesis” or “exegetical history”) seemed like a good way to achieve that integration, and I’ve learned heaps from doing this, and hopefully sharpened my skills while producing something of interest and value in the undiscovered country of seventeenth-century biblical interpretation.

Which arguments that Owen (specifically in The Death of Death) makes do you find to be the most compelling? Which arguments do you find to be the most problematic?

Mike Horton from Westminster Seminary in California first taught me the logical approach to this doctrine when we met in Oxford about 20 years ago, and he stole it entirely from Owen. The atonement must be either:

For all the sins of all people
For some sins of all people
For all the sins of some people

Which is it? Thinking through this question, and the consequences of going down each route, I find quite useful. That being said, I don’t find all the details of Owen’s exegesis of the so-called “problem texts” quite so compelling. But that’s OK, because Reformed exegetes have not had a monolithic, standardised approach to handling those texts, even if they are generally agreed on the doctrine.


For the rest, see:

http://www.credomag.com/2013/10/08/limited-atonement-%e2%80%94-an-interview-with-lee-gatiss-part-1/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CredoMagazineBlog+%28Credo+Magazine+Blog%29