I realized right after I'd posted that was what you were doing (showing the verses that bracketed what I'd quoted).....but decided to leave the post, as the rest stood.
That's not what I consider "cherry-picking" though (my quoting one verse)....because that *is* the thesis of the Good News that I see. I don't see any "if".....I see more of a "when they believe"
in Scripture. That's not taking anything out of context. We can go back and forth with different verses for all eternity....the thing is we view Scripture from different perspectives (or, as Emma Higgs writes about in this linked article.....we all have our "goggles that we read from"):
Quoting Emma Higgs-------->A common criticism of people like me who openly oppose
Penal Substitutionary Atonement theory is that we are picking and choosing the bits of the Bible we like, whilst ignoring some of the trickier bits.
I intend now to try and make it super clear that this is not what we are doing.
Invisible Goggles
The thing is, we all read things into the Bible that may or may not be there, based on our own understanding, cultural background and personal opinions.
It’s really,
really difficult to read the Bible objectively (impossible, actually) – we all emphasise some bits over others, reject some bits as irrelevant and project our own frameworks of understanding onto the text to help us make sense of it. This is not a bad thing – it just helps to be aware that we’re doing it.
Most Christians who believe in Penal Substitutionary Atonement claim that the Bible clearly supports it, and that there is no other way of interpreting certain texts. What they don’t realise is that they are reading the Bible through invisible lenses. Let’s call them
PSA goggles.
PSA goggles have been the height of fashion in the protestant, particularly evangelical church for a good many centuries now. Long enough that they’ve become so much a part of our identity, we don’t even realise we are wearing them. They provide a logical explanation of the core meaning of Christianity based on a handful of verses, through which we then view the rest of the Bible.
PSA goggles also seem to have the unfortunate effect of obscuring the wearer’s view, so that many parts of the Bible which don’t fit with PSA theory are overlooked or ignored.
Before we jump right into dealing with the specific passages that appear to support PSA, we need to look at six broader Biblical themes that will help to put them into context.
Read more at
A Thoroughly Biblical Argument Against Penal Substitutionary Atonement %
The theology that you seem to support (that Jesus rescued us from His angry/vengeful Father) divides up the Trinity (and then falls apart in many other ways as well). It's an entirely different narrative than what I see...mainly summed up as:
God made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.~2nd Corinthians 5:21
Quoting a main theme isn't "cherry-picking"--not in my view--it's simplifying the Gospel by a consistent theme.....a plot.
If you wish to define "cherry-picking" as simply leaving out parts of the Bible....then I guess I'm in good company, as Jesus did that Himself.
From Jeremy Myers:
When Jesus declared the purpose of His ministry, He cherry-picked a key Old Testament passage to show that He was not going to be violent at all.
The text I am referring to is
Luke 4:16-30. In this text, Jesus lays out His mission statement (Luke 4:18-19), which shows that He is only going to restore, heal, forgive, deliver, and set free. As part of His teaching, Jesus used an illustration from the Old Testament about how God sent Elijah the Prophet to a Gentile woman and a leprous Syrian general.
As a result of this sermon, those who listened to Jesus that day tried to kill Him (Luke 4:28-29).
Why did they try to kill Jesus?
Because Jesus cherry-picked the Old Testament to present God as non-violent.
His audience believed that God was violent, and this violence is then demonstrated in their attempt to kill Jesus (After all, you become like the god you worship).
How did Jesus cherry-pick the Old Testament?
Well, the text Jesus taught from was Isaiah 61:1-2. But if you go and look at the text that Jesus taught from, and compare it with the text He quoted in Luke 4:18-19, Jesus stopped His quotation midsentence! He didn’t finish reading Isaiah 61:2.
And what did He not read? The next phrase in Isaiah 61:2 talks about “the day of vengeance of our God.”
Jesus purposefully ignored this phrase! He excluded it from His reading.~
Why I Might Cherry-Pick Verses from the Bible
