What human being could ever believe that a holy and righteous God would forgive all their sins without some demonstration of God’s graciousness sufficient to overcome understandable doubts and hesitations in their darkened minds? That’s what the cross-cum-resurrection of Jesus is perfectly calibrated to provide.
However, to insinuate “divine wrath” at the Cross scuttles the demonstration! Then a person is forced to appeal to dubious and unconvincing arguments to prove (if it were possible) that “an innocent substitute was required to take ‘our place,’ die “our death,’ bear ‘our guilt,’ suffer ‘our penalty,’ experience ‘our judgment’—none of which phrases are to be discovered (because they have not been revealed!) in any passage of Scripture from one end to the other. When will we stop making up theology to make the inspired Scriptures “more accurate” or “more clear” than the Holy Spirit thought wise? When will we stop reading into God’s wholesome Explanation the assumptions of our corrupt legal cultures? 10/25/07]
There is no question either that Jesus endured punishment or that we sinners deserve punishment. But it is not correct to assert that “Jesus endured the punishment that we deserved.” For one thing, he was punished by humans for claiming to be God (which he was), so he certainly was not being punished by God for asserting this unique truth. (Nor, we might add, had any other human being made such an audacious claim, so could scarcely have “deserved” a punishment such as Jesus is alleged to have endured “for them.”) This means he was being wrongly punished. To see in this circumstance any efficacy accruing to the benefit of others, per se, lacks proper foundation. Nor did it benefit Jesus in terms of the very purpose of punishment, which is to correct someone for wrong behavior so that they learn to do right.
Furthermore, the very concept of “just deserts” has a thousand qualifiers regarding age, competence, comparative liability, awareness of the law, conscience, constraint, authority, circumstances, cultural mores, equity, rights, compelling cause, perception, intent, sanity, drug side-effects, etc. Therefore, to allege unqualifiedly that “sin deserves punishment” is indefensible. [10/25/07]
Evangelicals can not be exonerated from teaching “crude” beliefs about the Atonement by adducing either Jesus, Paul, or any other New Testament personage as not having taught such crudities. Indeed, they did not! But the orthodox and evangelicals down the centuries certainly have, and in no uncertain terms. They cannot successfully deflect all the caricatures for the simple reason that for those teachers who originally taught such “crudities,” they were not deemed caricatures at all, but comported well with their cultural outlook and sensibilities of the times. To be sure, had they stuck with Biblical conceptuality this complaint could hardly have been lodged, but they did not, so it can. Thus as cultures changed (happily, usually under the very thrust of whatever Gospel benefit could still eek through, which was, to be fair, certainly not inconsiderable), older teaching started to look “crude” (although often so even to perceptive contemporaries).
Nor will it avail much to abjure the “crudities” of the earliest and many subsequent centuries if, while still not learning from all those imprudent syncretistic missteps, we continue ardently to defend only the crudities of the previous century or two. How far does this legerdemain get us? If we determine to keep God’s people, who are depending on us for the real manna, within the most recent and “up to date” darkness, are they not in needless darkness still? This is hardly ingenuous or innocent of culpability for a teacher of God’s flock. Our enemies, and God’s, are dependent on us for their salvation, and we had better get prepared to answer their quite understandable sensitivity to the most modern wave of crudities our forbears have bequeathed to, indeed, foisted upon, us. We must repent of our fathers’ sins and usher our contemporaries into the fuller light beckoning from beyond. For God has “more Light to break forth from His holy Word” than our predecessors could have imagined…or welcomed. [10/25/07]
The Premial Atonement 