Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > Delivered from the Elements of the World: Atonement, Justification, Mission > Status Update

In Chapter 7, Leithart (1) enters the pistis Christou debate on the side of subjective genitive, (2) enters the penal substitutionary debate on the affirmative side, and then (3) skillfully and imo convincingly brings the two together.

Jesus, the faithful High King (David’s greater Son) is the penal substitution for Israel, taking the wrath she deserves as her one-flesh Husband. His faithfulness unto death saves us.

Leithart provides in chapter 4 one of the most useful systematic treatments on the biblical understanding of "flesh" I have ever encountered.

Too briefly put, "flesh" is (now) godless mortality driven by the fear of death into protectiveness, segregation, violence, and virility to both guard and extend itself.

Thus illuminating circumcision: the removal of flesh by the deliberate cutting of its most potent symbol.

A successful theory of the atonement:

1. Historically plausible: a meaningful interpretation of all events
2. Inevitable: end of an obvious trajectory with strong explanatory power for what came before
3. Levitical: fulfillment of ritual, especially sacrifice
4. Evangelical: arises from within Gospels
5. Epistolary: makes sense of words, sentences, arguments in Apostles' letters
6. Fruitful: leads to church history

"The common contemporary rhetoric of conflicts between religion and politics obscures the reality. Conflicts are never between politics and religion. Conflicts are always between rivals that are both religious and both political."

"Justification," being declared/proven right, must be placed within the ongoing war between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, on which depends the destiny of the cosmos over which mankind has been placed.

Jesus and all who are "in Him" were justified by His resurrection, and with it, a cosmological regeneration began in which the curse of death and the power of Satan is being turned back day by day.

Leithart spends the last few chapters providing a taxonomy of today's socio-religious landscape outside the Church. He has three designations:

1.) Those still living under the elements (e.g., tribal and more ancestral religions)

2.) Those "on the boundary" whose religion has been Christianized (e.g., Buddhism, Islam, etc.)

3.) Galatianists who were once Christian but have slid back into a world under the elements