Pay close attention to yourself and to your teaching; persevere in these things, for as you do this you will ensure salvation both for yourself and for those who hear you. (1 Timothy 4:16)
Concerns about Bible Project and its co-founder Tim Mackie continue to grow. The recent discovery of Mackie’s advocacy of anti-biblical meditative practices has been stunning. Bible Project has produced numerous videos on biblical subjects, some of them quite good. These can be found on YouTube and the videos are used by many churches, particularly in youth ministries. Tim Mackie has many sermons on YouTube as well. It can be stated that Mackie and Bible Project have millions of followers.
As a number of these videos attest, Mackie promotes some errant, even heretical, theology. While one of his teachings makes clear his contempt for the Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA), that same “sermon” seems to reveal his view of the PSA as a belief based on ancient pagan sacrifices to the gods. Watch the following video from 34:42 to 38:08. Mackie has been explaining the Old Testament sacrificial system.
Transcribed portions from the above video:
- 36:10 [These] gods hate you and they’re going to kill you or send plague on your flocks or something like that, and so what you need to do is kill this animal so that it can die instead of the gods killing you.
- 36:30 And once the god has their pound of flesh then they’ll leave you alone and be happy with you. And what we do is read that story onto the story of what’s happening here, and then we bring Jesus into it and what we end up with is a story that says, God’s perfect he’s holy and he’s perfect, you’re not so God has to kill you, he has to kill you. He needs His pound of flesh to, in the name of His justice, and so he’s gonna kill you because he’s angry at you.
- 37:05 But instead he’s gonna kill Jesus and he takes out his anger on Jesus and then he allows you after you die to go to the good place and not the bad place, you can sing forever the praises of the God who didn’t kill you. How you guys doing? Now some of you, I’m creating a caricature, but for some of us, you might think like, yeah, isn’t that the story of Christianity, isn’t that what Christians believe?
Mackie then says:
37:56 If you read the character of God in the Old Testament you’d be able
to spot what I just said to you as a total distortion and perversion of God’s
character and of the good news and of the meaning of atonement.
Such a twisted understanding of the Scriptures. What Mackie is doing here is presenting a “social” atonement, not Penal Atonement. This can be further seen by what he says next in the video where he describes“atonement” as being more related to how we as people hurt the world when we aren’t nice to each other. Whether he realizes it or not, he is rejecting biblical atonement.
What Mackie doesn’t say about the atonement is as bad as what he does say. He does not acknowledge in this sermon (that he said was a sermon on the definition of atonement) that Jesus is God in the flesh and was a perfect sinless sacrificial lamb whose blood was shed for the atoning of sin.
And for a sermon on atonement, he neglects to include the Scripture that says: “without shedding of blood is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22).
Rather than saying any of these things, instead, he says, Jesus is “going to be the human that you and I areall created and called to be but perpetually failed to be” (44:36)
Mackie’s position on the Penal Substitutionary Atonement is right in line with author/theologian N.T. Wright. Three of Wright’s books are on Tim Mackie’s Recommended List,[1] and Wright has been interviewed by Mackie several times. In his review of Wright’s book, The Day The Revolution Began, T.C. Moore notes:
Wright bluntly critiques popular notions of the meaning of Jesus’s Cross as “pagan”—particular portrayals that center around the idea of an angry God demanding the blood sacrifice of an innocent human victim. [2]
Sound familiar?
In his denial of the PSA, Tim Mackie is following in the footsteps of N.T. Wright, The Shack author William Paul Young, and many others.
As a Bible believer recently noted online:
PSA is the one “theory of the atonement” that makes the others make sense. It is the key to all the others, which don’t work unless Jesus substituted for us in taking the Father’s wrath against sin on himself, and gave us his righteousness in place of our unrighteousness.
Because the Lord loves us, Christ willingly took our place of punishment by dying on the cross. He received the wrath that we deserve.
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)
So what was Mackie’s audience thinking as he linked Penal Substitutionary Atonement to “pagan notions of like Zeus or Apollo[s]* or Dionysus”? Were there any questions or objections?
Here is another question: Is it perhaps time to ask Christians, particularly pastors and youth pastors, to examine some of Mackie’s troubling teachings?
Source Notes:
1. Tim Mackie book recommendations: bibleproject.com/tim-mackie.
2. T.C. Moore, On N.T. Wright, The Cross, and Systemic Racism.
*Sounds like an “s” at the end of the pagan deity Apollo.
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