PISTIS (ΠΙΣΤΙΣ) should usually be rendered “faithfulness” when attributed to Jesus Christ.
HAMARTIA (ΆΜΑΡΤΙΑ) can denote “sin-offering” in key New Testament passages reflecting the ritual sacrificial language of Leviticus (LXX).
HAIMA (ΆΙΜΑ)—blood (of sacrificial rituals) represents the diverse powers of resurrected life.
Romans 5:8-10 equates “blood” with “life,” when the syntactical structure is accurately aligned, not with “death.”
DIKAIOMA (ΔΙΚΑΙΩΜΑ) in Romans 5:16,18 & 8:3 signifies a “just award” (judicially granted Christ by God, namely, the Holy Spirit of life via resurrection), and not either a “righteous act/deed” (done by Christ, i.e., “suffering the cross”) (5:16,18) or “righteousness” (as inner moral virtue) (8:3), as traditionally translated.
“The righteousness of God” in the New Testament is uniformly premial (not penal) and was supremely exemplified by God’s historic act of raising Jesus from the dead.
The cross was a place of diabolical rage and fury plus human condemnation, but decidedly not a locus of divine wrath or condemnation in any sense whatsoever.
The victory of the cross was that Jesus remained sinless even in the face of the most extreme and unjust suffering of abuse, rather than either justifying himself or using his rightful messianic prerogatives to avenge himself. He waited for God’s justice/justification. Therefore, he won the just award of immortal life, and some!
God’s justice toward His Son was exclusively rewarding (premial), not at all penal.
God’s justice toward His Son was ultracompensatory.
Jesus’ ransom was a heroic exchange and not at all a penal substitution (so there was no economic equivalence or parity at play).
Jesus was not “forsaken” in the Unseen (ΆΙΔΗΣ, hades), Acts 2:25-28, Psalm 16:8-11 LXX, and only briefly “forsaken” (Psalm 22:1) on the cross to permit the strategic death of his body and compassionate cessation of his suffering abuse (which, after all, was never intended as any sort of exchange currency whose gross amount must weigh in on the extent of mercy or grace or atonement or salvation or anything else in God’s possession, for that matter, neo-liberal, zero-sum economics to the contrary notwithstanding).
God’s wrath/indignation fell not upon His Messiah at the cross, but upon all Jerusalem before that generation passed away (70 A.D.), on account of what they perpetrated by the cross as well as to earlier prophets.
To “bear” sins is to “absorb” whatever harm and loss they cause, instead of retaliating (i.e., avenging oneself). Therefore, it denotes forgiving or pardoning others of their sins against us, not some phantom notion of “getting imputed with sins” ourselves.
We should leave avenging of ourselves to God, not because avenging is wrong per se for human beings (after all, that’s what “the higher authorities” have been officially appointed by God to do, Rom. 13:1-7), but because only God can do so with truly satisfying justice, sans overreactions or lurking self-interests and hidden agendas.
Adam’s sin was not “imputed” to his descendants (rendering them guilty for them, too).
Our sins are not “imputed” to Christ (rendering him guilty before God and worthy of wrath).
Christ’s righteousness is not “imputed” (ΛΟΓΙΖ-, counted, accounted) to us who believe (allegedly rendering us righteous before God).
The Holy Spirit in superabundance was part of Christ’s just award from God for his enduring obedience to his Father’s precepts even through a treacherous, prolonged public execution.
The Holy Spirit in abundance overflows to believing sinners and actually effects the internal cleansing from our sins.
The Explanation of the Proclamation is the power of salvation and alone possessses the ability to generate faith because it provides the abundant eye-witness testimony required to validate it.
The function of believing is an ineradicable capacity of divinely-crafted human nature, which God fashioned to be dependent on evidence and proof for its proper foundation and direction.
All who are “in Christ” by faith and baptism are “dead TO” sins, offenses, lusts, and foreskin/’uncircumcision’ (Eph. 2:1, 5, Col. 2:13, properly translated, cf. Romans 6:1-14); no scripture speaks of anyone being “dead IN” sin, etc.
When Adam sinned, death “passed through to all mankind, whereupon [ΕΦΩ, literally “on/upon which”] all sinned” (Rom. 5:12), i.e., precisely the inverse causality from the Vulgate’s (Jerome’s) culpable mistranslation, “because” (which in Greek would require ΔΙΑ, with the accusative case) and Augustine’s notorious exploitation of it. “Original sin” is therefore a serious misnomer and can only lead to spurious inferences and doctrinal confusion.
The resurrection of Jesus was the supreme historic event where God was justified and Jesus was justified. On the strength of that event, all who trust God are likewise justified and, accordingly, receive the Spirit of Life.
Jesus was not saved at the cross but, much rather, destroyed there, in sight of throngs of eyewitnesses (or haven’t you read the Bible?). He was saved by his resurrection, and that salvation by God precipitated the salvation of all others who trust him as Savior.
Human sovereignty and authority, also over our own bodily and psychical faculties, have not been revoked; they account for what is commonly, popularly, but erroneously categorized under the rubric of ‘freewill.’
God’s graciousness was not ‘bought‘ by Christ’s sufferings of abuse, therefore it is not limited, metered, or calculated commensurate with them.
Sins have not been “paid for“; they neither need to, ought to, nor can be. Sacrifices were never intended for “payment“; much rather, they prophetically pre-figured the voluntary self-sacrifice of the Son and Heir of God, the King of Israel, in order to win a just repayment from God in return for that incomparaable injustice so as to ransom sinful humanity from death and its sting, alike.
Adam’s posterity ‘pay for’ (if you insist…but see Romans 6:7 and enveloping context) their own sins simply by dying. However, to gain newness of life we need to identify with Christ’s wrongful death and rightful resurrection by way of faith and baptism.
God only warned Adam of death if he should ever eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, yet not of ‘spiritual death,’ much less ‘eternal death‘ (Genesis 2:16-17). Christ’s own death (not some postulated ‘eternal‘ or ‘spiritual‘ vagary) was a quite sufficient injustice inflicted upon this sinlessly innocent man so that God was induced to render him the supercompensating justice of resurrection from the dead plus royal exaltation to David’s promised throne over the earth. Oh, and did I mention the inexpressible boon of the Holy Spirit?
“The righteousness of God” and “the faithfulness of Christ Jesus” are complementary covenantal expressions as employed by Paul’s arguments in Romans, Galatians, and Philippians.
2 Corinthians 5:21 makes reference to Christ being made a “sin [offering],” not a “sin” per se! Such normative usage is marbled throughout Leviticus. The clincher? The very function of that ritual “sin” was precisely to constitute the offerer ritually “righteous” again. Christ Jesus ushered in the prophesied real McCoy once for all on Golgotha; that real “righteousness,” in turn, was dispensed abroad at the following Pentecost, i.e., God’s promised Holy Spirit in colossal outpour (2 Corinthians 3:2-9)—God’s very own personal righteousness to all who dare to believe the News!
Romans 8:3 also makes reference to God sending His own Son an “[offering] concerning sin.” This was God’s quintessential conciliatory, propitiatory, peacemaking gesture vis a vis a long-alienated, still-desperate humanity starving, thirsting, gasping for life.
The Biblical concept of the Levitical blood sacrifices regards them as prophetic figures of the most extreme sin[-offering] of treasonously crucifying their designated Savior. Their aggregate fulfillment and radical supercession by way of the Savior’s resurrection forever nullified and dismantled the Levitical ritual system going forward.
Paul’s epistle to the Romans nowhere develops a “theology of the cross” in the slightest degree; quite the contrary, a “theology of the resurrection” is his obsessive focus. [5/2,4-6/11; 5/1-2/24]
The Premial Atonement 