At the Cross, Jesus was not rendering satisfaction for debts, but demonstrating forgivevness of sins, thereby conciliating offenders by God’s evident love and graciousness!

“ONE-TRACK MIND”

Forgive me if it seems to me that penal substitution advocates have a one-track mind. Have you noticed that it never faintly occurs to them to ask what ever became of God’s “necessary” rewarding (premial) justice? This is surely a most debilitating blind spot, or worse, tunnel-vision in their perception. By “justice,” they always and only mean penal, punitive justice, which a vast host of Scriptures in both Old and New Testaments testify to be but one aspect of justice, yet with the rewarding or restorative facet remaining the chief part of justice! In fact, offenders were usually (except in capital crimes) “punished” PRECISELY BY BEING REQUIRED TO RESTORE TO THEIR VICTIMS, WITH A NECESSARY SURPLUS. [6/13/11;5/19/24]

At the Cross, Jesus was not “accomplishing a real satisfaction for the debt of sin,” he was demonstrating a real forgiveness of the deed of sin perpetrated there. It was his gracious forgiveness there (instead of sending in the angelic troops) that God further endorsed on the third day by utterly reversing the deadly effects of their murderous deed—itself worthy of death!—by raising His Son from among the dead and bequeathing him sovereignty over all. GOD’S TRIUMPHANT TRUMP! [6/13/11; 5/19/24]

Penal substitution does not connect the dots of Biblical texts and terms regarding the Atonement, it crosswires them. [6/14/11]

Once we grasp the premial nature of the Atonement we can see the teachings of Jesus in their true light, for he fulfilled them in his career and death to a degree otherwise obscure and even contradictory (on the penal substitution assumption), for in that case he would be exemplifying what is impossible in principle for us to emulate, thus undermining their ethical relevance and societal force. Yet on premial assumptions Christ accomplished to perfection, along with a stupendous supercompensating award from God’s rewarding justice for the sake of the whole doomed race, what the rest of us human beings can in principle undertake to a worthy extent in the power of the Spirit he procured for us, despite our being born in sin. Thus Christ’s total work both accomplished the impossible and thereby acquired the power that enables us to make a very commendable start at “doing the impossible” too! This is the engine of the Kingdom of God! The true Christian ethic and lifestyle is an exploitation of the New Covenant powers the Lord Jesus Christ made available by his death and resurrection. These outcomes are fruits of God’s justice to Jesus that so happily reversed his voluntarily assumed plight on behalf of our salvation, and goes on to rid us of sin and the dread of death. In this magnificent manner, the Lord’s redemptive ETHIC and EXAMPLE and EFFORTS ALL COALESCE IN UNANIMOUS TESTIMONY! [6/15/11; 5/19/24]

ABERRATIONS OF THE ATONEMENT

When the premial justice of God taught by the apostles of Jesus fell into obscurity around the 4th century, theories of the atonement (and, since the Protestant Reformation, of justification as well) began to proliferate. To this very day they show few signs of settled resolution. A host of aberrations litter the historic landscape to pose hazardous snares to the would-be convert and unwary saint alike. Theologians keep trotting out many of them before our gaze, but they are phantoms, partial truths, double images, or patchwork affairs. [6/15/11; 5/19/24]

Even were a penal substitution advocate to half-heartedly acknowledge the bare existence of God’s premial justice, they could accord it NO PLACE OR ROLE IN THE ATONEMENT! It would stand virtually IDLE within their system of “necessities“! It remains merely a feckless drone with no power to save! Very different is the apostle Paul’s assessment of God’s saving righteousness, i.e., restorative justice. Had Martin Luther understood exactly how God’s justice saves those who have faith, the message of the Reformation could not easily have been co-opted to the service of a penal, punitive ideology of the Atonement and its many tragic ethical, legal, military, economic, industrial, environmental, societal, domestic, and other outcomes, which are only continuing to mount ominously in our uncomprehending day. [6/16/11; 5/19/24]

The historic record of God’s justice to Jesus is what creates the trust that conciliates hesitant sinners to Them; thereupon God sends them His Holy Spirit with assorted powers to corroborate the truth with gracious tokens of Their love. SWEET!!!

“And for the lamb he shall pay fourfold [LXX, sevenfold], because he did this thing, and since he had no pity!” 2 Samuel 11:6.

This prophetic exposure of David’s sin with Bathsheba (“sheba” also meaning “seven”) is “[i]n keeping with the law in Exodus 21:37.” *

*Everett Fox, Give Us a King!: Samuel, Saul, and David. A new translation of Samuel I and II with an introduction and notes by Everett Fox. New York: Schocken Books, 1999, p. 203, note 6. [3/16/11]

Everything we get by believing the Gospel is ipso facto accounted to faith. Therefore, because we receive the Holy Spirit when we believe, that is, the dispensing of the righteousness of the New Covenant (2 Corinthians 3:7-9) in Christ’s blood (Hebrews 13:20), then that righteousness is reckoned or imputed to us as we believe (Romans 4). In this marvelous way, God honors our simple faith in His own proclamation about His Son’s suffering abuse on our behalf, since faith is nothing in itself, but is dependent (is dependence!) upon external testimony and proof for its very existence. [3/17/11]

The spirit of Calvinism, insofar as it is distinguished from other streams of Christianity, tends to be uniquely punitive, joyless, smug, and abusive. Those (among other) destabilizing qualities and traits are, I would suggest, inseparable reflexes of the penal satisfaction theory of the Atonement and are well (if only partially) summarized by the Five Points of Calvinism that constitute key points where it hardened up against the gentle corrective attempts of Jacob Arminius, who otherwise, it should be emphasized, had no special bone to pick with Calvinism (as represented in Calvin’s own writings, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Belgic Confession). Insofar as the offending theory is radically false, the spirit of Calvinism is, by reflex, an evil spirit and produces evil fruits that battle against the fruits of the Spirit, good intentions to the contrary notwithstanding. Since Calvinism early became callused against the gentle discipline of Arminius it has repeatedly churned out attitudes contradictory to the authentic graciousness of God for Christ’s sake. Once the penal substitution theory is effectively overthrown by premial restitution, all Five Points must fall like dominoes, and attitudes will morph accordingly. [3/18/11; 4/17/24]

It is difficult to read Hugo Grotius’s refutation of Faustus Socinus’s critique of satisfaction theories of the Atonement without the growing conviction that he is all too often merely quibbling and captious. (See Robert S. Franks, A History of the Doctrine of the Work of Christ. [Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2001]; reprint of A Historical Study of Christian Doctrine [Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1962]), pp. 389-409). He ‘divides and conquers’ by splitting hairs and neglecting the basic thrust of Socinus’s treatment, and before long takes to swallowing camels. [3/18/11]

God does not “demand” faith from us, which we somehow have to “work up.” Much rather, He gives testimony, i.e., proof by way of eyewitness reports by credible observers concerning His own historic interventions on behalf of His beleaguered Son, AND THIS HISTORICAL RECORD ITSELF GENERATES FAITH IN THOSE WHO HEAR, EVEN IN SPITE OF THEMSELVES. ONLY PROOF, TESTIMONY, EVIDENCE, etc. HAVE SUCH POWER TO CREATE FAITH. So, believing, at bottom, is not itself the problem here. God has invested much that is necessary to induce faith within sin-darkened hearts between the covers of the Bible. Furthermore, He has followed up with signs, miracles, healings, and other powerful interventions before the eyes of every generation since then as additional corroboration. So if people do not trust Him upon reading/hearing such a well-attested (not to add Spirit-inspired) Story and observing the powers of God’s impending Kingdom in their midst, it is not for lack of these fiducial requisites (although, to be sure, the latter are too often in meager supply due to the inroads of cessationist theories among our teachers). Rather, it is because they love the darkness rather than the Light for their acts are vicious” (John 3:19), hence they are hating the Light lest their acts get exposed and they get put to shame.

All this means that the necessary condition of faith in order to be saved is no high-handed, arbitrary, harsh “demand,” as it were, to make “bricks without straw,” nor is it (as Calvinistic doctrine is wont to insist) “impossible without the gift of the Holy Spirit to make it effectual in the elect.” For the Gospel itself, the resurrectionary Explanation for the cross, the Proclamation of Christ, is itself the power of our salvation, which, when believed, is THEREUPON further corroborated by an empirical outpouring of the Holy Spirit to immerse and embrace us in a fuller consciousness and enjoyment of salvation’s reality by actual experience. This all amounts to an exhibit of “graciousness [in the outpoured Spirit] in exchange for graciousness [in the Reasoning of the Gospel]”—the fruit of spiritually examining the favors God is making ready for us via the Spiritual words He has matched them with in Scripture (1 Corinthians 2:9-16). [3/18/11; 4/17/24]

God’s judicial intervention to raise Jesus from the dead took off guard the prevalent assumptions about how He should/could/would avenge injustices.

The Kingdom of God advances or recedes on earth to the extent we are victorious in spiritual battle over whatever temptations Satan may hurl and our dying flesh may arouse in league with his kingdom of vice and viciousness in the dark alleys and public squares of battleground-Earth. God’s Kingdom, therefore, will never enjoy irreversible gains, given the vicissitudes of the cosmic struggle. “Building the Kingdom” is hence a deceptive metaphor and, in any case, one not found in the New Testament. Nota bene!

Eternal vigilance is the unvarying rule. Christ’s disciples ‘carry around’ his Kingdom with them wherever they go. Their duty is to let their light shine in the enveloping darkness and not let their lamps go out…or run out of Oil! Rather, we should ever be full of the Spirit—the power of God that constitutes the very ‘essential Oil‘ of His Kingdom. In this way we give credit to our Father in heaven; we must take no credit to ourselves for the mighty works He may do through us, even potentially greater things than Jesus did while on earth. [1/26/11; 8/31/23]

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead took everyone by such a startling surprise that it took some time before they finally realized that they had just beheld the justice or “righteousness” of God in unprecedented exhibit on behalf of salvation! For it turned out to be a rewarding act rather than a penal act, which everyone had grimly come to expect from God whenever He periodically breaks through with justice. The apostle Paul tried to clarify this at large in the book of Romans—full of Resurrection, yet with not a single mention of the Cross—this being his longest epistle by far! Nor did Paul ever mention the “wrath of God” in connection with the Atonement. Nor, again, did he ever hint that God needed to ‘be reconciled’ with mankind (an orthodox evangelical commonplace). In addition, he dropped hints everywhere that that justification is a function of the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. These obvious hints should have shepherded theologians to draw very different conclusions than they actually have. Evidently something has gone terribly wrong among their ranks. [1/26/11; 8/31/23]

Those vaunted ‘scientific’ skeptics who query, “Why would a rational God want to deceive His rational creatures by creating life forms almost instantaneously that bear the marks of age if, in fact, He actually did create them in mere moments?” are bringing a cartload of uniformitarian assumptions about “age” to their heftily loaded question. In truth, God has happily provided an “origins” manual, so that we don’t get snared by our own deceptively plausible assumptions, necessarily drawn (as they must be) from our own limited historical and personally empirical experience (whether or not we possess scientific credentials).

However, by way of reinforcement of His identity as the Creator who possesses power sufficient for such instantaneous creation, the Bible also contains many multiple-eyewitness reports of God’s astounding powers over His creation, not the least of which amount to re-creation of injured and even non-existent body parts…in a matter of moments, not eons. Eyewitness testimony by unprejudiced observers (and even more so by honest observations issued by witnesses prejudiced against the possibility of such phenomena) should count for something, after all. The implications should be unmistakable. [1/26/11; 8/31/23]

As much as a ransom is a SUBSTITUTION or EXCHANGE, just so little is it penal or punitive. In other words, a ransom, insofar as it entails the trade of a person (instead of, e.g., currency or commodities) is always a NON-PENAL SUBSTITUTION. Indeed, it is normally associated with a sense of great and wrongful, even extorted, loss…yet one recouped by a worthwhile gain. Whenever a human being happens to serve as a ransom price, especially if a volunteer, we regard the deed as admirable, noble, even heroic, but certainly not penal.

Ultimately, this final hideout of ‘penal substitution‘ advocates is found to be no protection at all, but a sure proof of their gross negligence of observable Biblical data. [1/27/11]

THE CROSS AND THE ‘TRINITY’

The cross is the landmark watershed event when it comes to ‘sorting out’ and ‘dividing up’ the ‘Trinity.’

Was the Son revealing, manifesting, and displaying there how the Father forgives, or was the Son ‘paying off’ the Father there for our debt of sins instead? It absolutely cannot be both, for they are mutually exclusive operations.

Was Jesus showing us the utter single-mindedness of Deity, or was he performing a ‘satisfaction‘ to another member of the ‘Trinity’ instead? It absolutely cannot be both, for they are diametric opposites.

There can be no fence-sitting on the matter. Was the Son always “walking in the Spirit” of his Father and, therefore, “always doing [his] Father’s desire,” and thus showing us how to resist the lusts of his mortal flesh (see Edward Irving, et al), even to the extent of obediently allowing himself to get strung up and nailed to a cross by his foes, and thus qualifying himself for a mighty act of deliverance by his Father’s categorical justice, expressed by exorbitant GRACIOUSNESS? Or was he setting himself up as a sitting duck so that his Father could assault him with wrath to show us how much He hated sin (presuming that His Son literally, mysteriously, ‘became sin’ on the cross)? It cannot be both of these radically disparate scenarios.

Was the deep darkness that descended out of nowhere on that scene of tragedy an indication of how much God deplored the sin that was being perpetrated by the dark powers upon His ever-beloved Son, the Light of the world, being agonizingly snuffed out on that high-noon showdown between Deity and depravity, or was it a heavenly sign of how much the Father abominated the ‘sin’ that His Son had allegedly been made for us? For it cannot be both; they are irreconcilable. [1/28/11]

Turretin erred in alleging that God’s unique Son stood as ‘surety’ for human debts of sin.

It stretches parables beyond the breaking point to insist that they be put to the yeoman service of abstract, technical dogmas. Case in point: the parable of the unjust debtor in Matthew 18:21-35. It teaches simply that we should forgive the sins (conceived as “debts“) of others against us, even as God forgives our sins (likewise represented as “debts” to Him) without demanding payment of any kind. Now, in line with the post-Reformation Genevan-Italian Calvinist theologian Francis Turretin, to interpose the assumption that all such forgiven debts of sin must be paid for by someone who stands as “surety” for our debts is to burden the poor parable to the brink of collapse. Instead, God Himself “absorbs” the loss from love, expressed as gracious forgiveness. He “stands surety” for His own “losses”; He did not exact them from His beloved Son at the bitter cross. For in tandem with the Father’s loss of His dear Son to a wretchedly dishonorable and undeservedly agonizing demise stands Christ’s own individual loss of life (though without loss of divine favor!) in the event. Accordingly, the role of Jesus on the cross was that of displaying, manifesting, and revealing to mankind exactly how his Father (whose perfect image and characterization he in fact is, after all) was at that very moment responding to the sins of His slayers, for is this not PRECISELY THE DEMONSTRATION OF GOD’S LOVE THAT WE NEED TO KNOW IN ORDER TO GET CONCILIATED TO HIM?

To imagine rather, with Turretin, that not only was even full “REPAYMENT of the debt” not sufficient to achieve forgiveness (flying in the face of abundant conciliatory appeals throughout the New Testament), but that additionally EXACTION OF PUNISHMENT was required, is not merely to make the analogy ‘walk on all fours,’ but to squash it ignobly like roadkill under THE JUGGERNAUT OF PENAL IMPOSITION, YEA, PUNITIVE PRESUMPTION! Thus does Turretin deal treacherously with Scripture in general and the Gospel in particular. We can leave it to God to judge those who depart from His Words. But we must not delay to correct them by whatever further Light He beams forth from Scripture in our day, furnished so abundntly with sophisticated and even computerized analytical tools unavailable until only decades ago. What excuse can we plead to keep plodding along in the treacherous aging ruts of fallible human traditions? [12/22/10; 8/15/23]

The Lord Jesus Christ paid for us and our salvation at the staggering loss of his own precious blood, for GOD REIMBURSED HIM WITH THE UNSPEAKABLE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT OF LIFE TO FURTHER DISBURSE FREELY TO ALL WHO BELIEVE, SO AS TO CLEANSE THEM FROM ALL SIN AND THEN EMPOWER THEM WITH MIRACULOUS FAVORS IN ORDER TO TESTIFY TO GOD’S KINGDOM OF JUSTICE AND HENCE DRAW ALL MANKIND BACK TO GOD THEIR SAVIOR. [12/22/10; 8/15/23]

That the Greek preposition huper is by no means to be understood in a ‘substitutionary’ sense is clear, among other texts, from 1 John 3:16: “By this we know love, seeing that he, for our sakes, lays down his soul. We also ought to lay down our souls for the sake of the brethren.” That Francis Turretin* can so blithely overthrow the clear and simple meaning of such a Scripture where a perfectly obvious, uncomplicated, and ethically compelling parallel is drawn by the Holy Spirit is further evidence of the treachery of his scholastic tradition against the premial justice of God as laid down within inspired apostolic Scripture.

*Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Vol. II (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1994): 428. [12/22/10; 8/15/23]

Even as God gave His Son the Spirit “without measure” in order to heal and cure, in accordance with Isaiah’s prophecy (53:4), “Surely he bore our infirmities,” as Matthew quotes (8:17), so also God bequeathed Jesus the superabundant gift of the Holy Spirit, poured out at Pentecost and ever since, because he was willingly yet unjustly “pierced on account of our transgressions” and “crushed on account of our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:5), for those supremely sinful human deeds of wicked ‘punishment’ that “God laid on him” (Isaiah 53:6) “brought us peace” and by those vicious wounds “we are healed.” The modus operandi was exactly the same on both fronts, contrary to Francis Turretin*, et al.

*Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Vol. II (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1994): 427. [12/22/10; 8/15/23]

Jesus did not suffer the ‘punishment due our sins‘ but rather the [unjust—”in his humiliation his judgment was taken away“! Isaiah 53:8 LXX, Acts 8:33] punishment of/from/by our sins! [12/22/10; 8/15/23]

The Devil has himself to thank for provoking the Power that is presently nullifying his kingdom and works of darkness. Seemingly clueless about the redemptive storm he would unleash by perpetrating such a magnitude of injustice and horror as the official, public, cruel crucifixion of his only rival for dominion over the world, he was foiled into overlooking the comparatively untapped potential of God’s restorative justice to save the upright and reward them despite even the interposition of death itself—in fact, all the more so because of its wrongful interruption of Jesus’ flawless career! [12/23/10; 8/15/23]

How can you find a GRACIOUS GOD at a WRATHFUL CROSS?

To read the New Testament and still be able to ask the strange question, “How can I find a gracious God?” as Martin Luther did, reveals a curious blindness that must have been inbred by way of some more popular or more official theology and practice based on alien assumptions. The authentic Proclamation of God’s graciousness must have been gradually, successively subverted and overturned during the Middle Ages, because the resultant question almost sounds like impertinence, a strangely obtuse query indeed. [4/12/06]

OVERCOMPENSATING THE VICIOUS

That God should overcompensate the vicious for their viciousness against the innocent, even as He overcompensates the innocent for the abuse they suffer at the hands of the vicious, should come as no surprise at all. For the overcompensation God exacts from them is only the overcompensation they owe to the innocent whom they have injured but of course refuse to own up to, much less pay back to them voluntarily! The vicious are gratuitous sinners, harming others for the fun of it. Therefore, since they have hardened themselves in this habitual practice and refuse to change their minds and do right, they will be tormented gratuitously by a just God who recompenses deservingly “according to acts” and judges “without partiality.” We reap what we sow—“some 30-, some 60-, some 100-fold.” The harvest of viciousness will be terrifying beyond imagining, but ultimately go out with a whimper and a puff of smoke ascending for the ages as a grim memorial. [4/12/06]

JUST OVERCOMPENSATION AND PARASYMPATHETIC REBOUND

The divine principle of just overcompensation has its echo even within the realm of physiology in the phenomenon of parasympathetic rebound. The human body will eventually adapt itself to the effects of psychotropic drugs taken regularly even by prescription (although not without variously harmful repercussions—too often permanent ones). But most disturbingly, even attempts to withdraw from them, especially too rapidly, are often attended by physiological overcompensation, with horrifying results.  Here ony may recount the litany of national tragedies haunting the widespread prescription of especially the class of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants such as Prozac and its ‘me-too’ competitor clones, Zoloft, Paxil, Luvox, etc.

Such indisputably documented but unpredictable physiological overreactions may have something to teach us about the natural psychological reactions that we variously experience when confronted with a perceived insult, assault, injury, or other injustice. [4/12/06]

The notion of the Cross as a lightning rod for God’s wrath against sin simply won’t wash…won’t atone! It is barbaric, brutal, savage, superstitious, ineffectual, and, moreover, thoroughly unnecessary. Yet more to the issue, it is not taught in Scripture nor among the earliest church authors. This is telling. The notion of a righteous God exhausting and thus ‘satisfying‘ His indignation against sin by erupting upon an innocent victim—His very own ‘Spirit and blood’!—ought to strike us as blasphemous. What’s gone awry with our theological sieve—our ‘heresy‘ filter?

The image—I saw it depicted on a flannelgraph board many times as a child in tri-weekly chapel at a fine Christian school—of a judge offering his own son to serve the sentence or pay the fine of a convicted criminal has been represented as fairly illustrating ‘the Gospel truth’.  But does it?

Peter’s first epistle is eloquent on the nature of graciousness, and it doesn’t come within a light year of teaching substitutionary penalizing as a means of somehow eliciting divine graciousness or transferting it to human malefactors. “For this is graciousness, if, because of conscience toward God, any one is undergoing sorrows, suffering abuse unjustly. For what credit is it if, sinning and being buffeted, you will be enduring it? But if, doing good and suffering abuse, you will be enduring, this is graciousness beside God.” (1 Peter 2:19-20)

So here, clearly God’s graciousness is awarded to those who suffer abuse although righteous. And who is the paragon of this truth, the supreme paradigm of this pattern? That is precisely why the apostle continues…why he can continue: “For for this were you called, seeing that Messiah also suffered abuse for your sakes, leaving you a copy that you should be following up in the footprints of him who does no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth; who, getting reviled, reviled not again; suffering abuse, threatened not, yet gave it over to Him Who is judging justly, who himself carries up our sins in his body on to the pole, that, coming away from sins, we should be living for righteousness; by whose welt [unjust though it was!] you were healed. For you were as straying sheep, but now you turned back to the Shepherd and Supervisor of your souls.” (1 Peter 2:21-25)

And it follows as night the day that if it were just for God to punish our copy and paradigm with penalties that we deserved, then it would be yet more ‘just‘ for Him to punish us sinners penally for the sins and injustices of others as well, for we “follow” in his footsteps! So where does graciousness show up in this twisted scenario? If God’s favor can now be shown to us because His anger was shown to Messiah, then can His favor be shown to our abusers because His disfavor gets vented on us? Did I miss something? This is a dangerously short-circuited logic if ever there was one! Even if theologians are not so bold as to out with it, yet this conclusion festers subcutaneously, ready to burst forth to the disgust and embarrassment of all, not least, God Himself!

Moreover, is this the way it worked with Job? Did the abuse he suffered provide any favor from God for his tormentors? Not by a long shot! In fact, God exacted sacrifices from them for righteous Job as payment for their foolish presumption! Whoa! Caveat accusor!

Much turns on getting this exactly right. Was there the least penal or punitive motive in God’s permitting Satan to try Job? Any wrath or anger or indignation in God’s heart? Any ‘offended honor‘? None to speak of…in holy Scripture, anyway! And where did God’s favor show up, both narratively and historically speaking? At the end! For it was there that, having successfully passed the test of faith and righteousness, graciousness finally appeared to award him in overcompensating superabundance. Voila! “Wherefore, girding up the loins of your comprehension, being sober [as Job surely was throughout!] expect perfectly/maturely the graciousness which is being brought to you at the unveiling of Jesus Messiah.” (1 Peter 1:13)

The next objection that pops to mind is, “But wasn’t it the will of God that Messiah suffer abuse and die?” Yet Peter answers that too: “For it is better to be suffering abuse for doing good, if the desire of God may be desiring, than for doing evil, seeing that Messiah also, for our sakes, once died concerning sins, the Just One for the sake of the unjust ones, that he may be leading us to God.” (1 Peter 3:17-18) So the answer is, “Yes.” But does this mean that God Himself was disposed in His heart to abuse Jesus for our sins? Well is that the way it worked with Job? Did God have some secret penal, punitive motive or vicarious mechanism of exchange in His very open and evident desire that Job should suffer abuse and great sorrow and staggering loss and bodily pain? The notion is ludicrous, not to add, offensive! Yet we cannot escape putting the whole matter this way, because Job is one of the most forceful and clear types of Messiah that we see in the Old Testament—a partial type, to be sure, but solid in its revelation.

Now it is certainly true that God stayed Satan’s hand from taking Job’s life itself (or how could God depict his grand denouement by repaying him in excess, thus proving His graciousness and, moreover, His righteousness/justice in desiring Job’s abuse in the first place?). Now observe:  God did not issue this restriction order in the case of Jesus. You can see where I’m going with this. It was exactly in letting Satan go all the way this time, yet also in providing a sinlessly innocent victim this time around, that God could likewise go all the way! Jesus led us all the way back to God (see Heb. 9): “Being put to death, indeed, in flesh, yet vivified in spirit…immersion is now saving you also…through the resurrection of Jesus Messiah, who is at God’s right hand, being gone into heaven, messengers and authorities and powers being subjected to him.” (1 Peter 3:18-22)

Thus was Satan tricked fair and square by his own historic momentum of bad habits! He never took the hints scattered throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. But we should. It is still in Satan’s best interests to muddle this Message and make God look like an egregiously vindictive warlord wreaking vengeance to satisfy His ‘wounded honor’ and overbearing superego. Such caricatures deserve only lampoons. Yet they are with us still, and many an unfledged theologian has tried to earn his stripes by tilting at the long string of critics lined up for the lists.

Why, oh why, are these errors so persistent? Why are the ostensive champions of evangelical orthodoxy so dead set on defending these unbiblical phantasms? It is certain that Satan has deceived many into representing matters so unflatteringly to God. But what’s the rest of the story? [4/12/06]

THE VICARIOUS SACRIFICE OF CHRIST WAS NOT PENAL

Jesus did, to be sure, suffer abuse ‘vicariously’ on our behalf—the Just One on account of the unjust multitude.  But even more surely, this vicious abuse was not at the hand of God but of Satan, the “Great Dragon” (Rev. 12:9) who wished to destroy the Son of Mankind and his seed.  God’s Chosen and Anointed One bore the humiliating crime of the Cross, instigated by the Adversary, so that his Father could openly demonstrate in the most persuasive and endearing manner conceivable the overwhelmingly overcompensating magnitude of his righteousness by rescuing Jesus from the inveterate foe of humanity and yanking his stinger out forcibly.

Viewed from this apostolic perspective, we can finally grasp clearly and fathom precisely what this ‘vicariousness’ shields us from:  not the wrath of God but the fury of Satan.

By ‘paying‘ such a ‘vicarious’ ransom to our diabolical captor, Jesus effected a de facto exchange that Satan by no means intended, but which his foolishness could not forestall:  we went free!  Hallelujah!

The exact mechanics of this liberation bear closer scrutiny.  By suffering this radically unjust abuse and death, Jesus won for us, as our divine Champion, the compensatory award (δικαιωμα) of agelong life, including the present, phenomenal down payment of that future allotment:  the promised Wholesome Spirit of Life. This charisma (χαρισμα), in all its variegated splendor (especially against the backdrop of a creation in the throes of remorseless entropy) is the empirical right of all those who by mere (!) faith are honored by a just God with the status of sons/daughters and heirs in His future Kingdom.  It is precisely this gift (δορημα) of agelong life, including its foretaste in Wholesome Spirit, that liberates us from Satan’s authority, because it both frees us from slavery via fear of death and furnishes an internal power source to resist Satan’s corrupting blandishments.

This means that the divine solution to ‘the sin problem’ (as Evangelicals are so fond of putting it) comes by way of the reversal of the death sentence against our sin, as was so fully and satisfactorily proved by the outpour of agelong life—along with its undeniable evidences, including the performance of signs, miracles, powers, and healings—-into the hearts of those who get sprinkled with the innocent blood of Christ, by faith.

Thus sinners actually, amazingly, get indemnified, and their sins get removed, erased, cleaned off, released/forgiven, by the very ‘stuff’ from which our sins alienated us—tangible life itself!  The innocent blood of the Lamb of God does everything for us!  It is God’s UNIVERSAL ANTIDOTE (literally, a remedy to ‘give in answer/response‘ or ‘counter‘ to a poison).  It solves everything redemptively:  it absolves wrongdoing; it dissolves opposition; it resolves alienation.  Within the blood of Messiah resides agelong life, salvation, justification, forgiveness, sanctification, deliverance, freedom, cleansing, erasure (of sins), peace, conciliation, ransom, and more.  This blood is figured in the water of baptismal immersion, the wine of the Lord’s Supper, and the oil of therapeutic anointing.  The living soul is “in” the blood.  Thus, by permitting the guilty shedding of his own innocent blood on our behalf, Messiah surrendered his Jewish flesh to injustice only to win it back again, glorified beyond ethnicity, along with a justly overcompensated surplus of life to give away gratuitously to whomever desires it, regardless of ethnic or national origin or any fleshly distinctions whatever that have divided human beings.

In sum, Jesus suffered the abuse of Satan’s full fury ‘vicariously’ for us so that we might escape death, thus also the fear of death, and consequently abject slavery to Satan and sin.  But did this effect an escape from God’s wrath, which burns against incorrigible sins?  The decisively unambiguous answer to this ‘burning’ (ahem) question must be “yes and no.”  No, if you mean this ‘vicarious’ fact ‘deflects’ God’s indignation away from our sins (and we must be warned against mistaking God’s delay or stay of execution for ostensive ‘deflection‘); but yes, if you mean that this ‘vicarious’ shedding of innocent blood for guilty flesh achieves removal of sin from the guilty sinner, thus removing the cause for wrath in the first place.

It is this simple distinction that accounts for the seriousness with which the early church took the Lord’s Supper.  For here they were collectively (think: Passover) feeding on the flesh and blood of the Lamb of God/Good Shepherd (!) who hereby takes away sin.  [4/10/06]

Yet for all this ‘vicarious‘ action by Messiah Jesus on our account, there is not the slightest hint of a ‘penal’ substitution.  ‘Penal substitution’ is premised on a compromised notion of God’s righteousness that imagines it appearing at the Cross, though in fact God did not show up until three days later to play His hand by ipso facto CONDEMNING THE CROSS as a horrible miscarriage of justice…in fact, an out-and-out  mortal sin! Even so, nothing that can’t be corrected by a little divine power and timely action.

This was “a secret having gotten hushed during agelong times” (Rom. 16:25), “having gotten concealed from ages and generations” (Col. 1:26) yet now unveiled for our wonderment: the incomparable wealth of glory of this secret—-Christ among us, our expectation of future glorification (Col. 1:27)—-which salvation is graciously accessible via the “obedience of faith” (Rom. 1:5, 16:26)!

Yet in this connection, there is still one more piece of the ‘puzzle’ that theologians have made out of the Atonement that, once we see how it fits, will take our breath away!

At the Cross there is not the slightest hint of ‘penal’ or ‘punitive’ action against Jesus’ enemies and killers.  This must be absorbed at full value before we can adequately appreciate Messiah’s abuse for what it really was:  SATAN’S SIN. For God all along knew who the ultimate enemy was.  Therefore, He did not go after Satan’s pawns; He was laying a trap for big game.  After all, Jesus came to save the world, not to condemn it.  These are collateral benefits of nullifying the works of Satan.

Vindictive human justice predictably would have ladled out reprisals, punitive overcompensations, penal ‘satisfactions’ as the price of the crime of the Cross.  Christ’s enemies should have ‘paid for‘ their premeditated enormity!  God should have crushed them with brimstone and incinerated them with fire from heaven!  But all in good time…

Are we disappointed?  Are we unsettled, ‘unsatisfied’ that God did not break forth with evident penal, punitive retribution to ‘fully satisfy’ His wrath on those wretches?  Isn’t it enough that He fully exposed Satan’s intended trickery and forever crushed his head, shattered his authority over Adam’s heretofore doomed offspring?  Must He also vent Himself on Satan’s wretched slaves and dupes?

What an injustice that would have been!  Petty reprisals are beyond the intentions of the Savior of the world.  Yet did we perhaps expect God, alternatively, to unleash that anger upon His own obedient Son as a ‘substitute’ somehow for not doing it to his envious, hateful, embittered enemies?  How hideous!

The work of total obedience was completely finished at the Cross; all that was now called for—all that Messiah’s absolutely innocent blood (i.e., “just soul“) was “crying out” for—-was proper avenging.  This observation necessarily implies that no avenging of any sort—especially no penal satisfaction, no punitive action whatsoever—by his Father could conceivably have been present to sully the pure, stark, stunning faithfulness, obedience, subordination, surrender—-Jesus’ filial love, openly, publicly, uniquely, exhibited on that cursed tree…of LIFE!  Accordingly, to perceive the Cross as the key to everlasting life we must see how it was indissolubly linked to the impending Resurrection that would actually—-historically—–set things right, restoring the harmony of the created universe disrupted by sin.  Once this cosmic fact is resolutely grasped, every deficient impulse to compromise the transparency of this radical criminality by imputing divine punitive, penal motives into its ordained significance will melt away in the beaming sunshine of divine love—both Son’s and Father’s—radiating Their rescuing wisdom untainted.

So, Peter Abelard was right…but only half right; he was right about the Cross but wrong in his silence about the Resurrection.  Yet even if he did have that detail wrong (or out of view), Anselm was no less wrong.  For although he would surely have sensed Abelard’s explanation to be incomplete, yet he himself presumed to add words without knowledge and ventured far beyond the apostolic pattern of sound explanations.  (This, at least, Abelard did not dare to do at this point.)  Yet both suffered virtual blindness about the justifying significance of the Messiah’s resurrection.  Even Paul Peter Waldenström, who perhaps came closer than most writers since the early Ante-Nicene church, and until the late 20th century, to understanding the nature of the Atonement, did not fully explore, expound, and secure this indispensable, and by his time still long-missing, link.

All penal, punitive theories of the Atonement are dead wrong and have proven to be deadly for far too many discerning prospects who, sadly, even tragically, took offense.  Is this the Devil’s revenge?  Is Satan making a comeback by twisting the liberating Proclamation of God’s Kingdom into a dull, incomprehensible God-dishonoring caricature—a grotesque gargoyle, ironically, in his own infernal image?  If so, then theologians have been his most amenable agents in this crafty stratagem of disinformation.  They have insinuated penal motives and punitive impulses between the virgin lines of wholesome Scripture.  They see penal satisfactions and divine wrath around the turn of every page.  Such theological rigor is akin to rigor mortis.  It reads death into the words of life!

But, sadly, there is more.  By reading penal or punitive elements into the Cross they underplay, neglect, ignore, and suppress where such elements actually did turn up on the historical stage, and by clear prophecies from both Old and New Testaments!  For Daniel the prophet as reiterated by Jesus himself in the Olivet Discourse pointed a long warning finger in the direction of 70 A.D., one generation—”this generation“!—beyond the Cross.  Exactly 40 years after their execution of their Messiah, the citizens of Jerusalem below, Jerusalem “after the flesh,” having remained stubborn to the graciousness of Jehovah Who gave them this merciful reprieve, suffered the terrors of God’s punitive, penal avenging to a degree that utterly defies polite description.  The “abomination of desolation” (Daniel 9:26-27) exhibits the wrath of God in no uncertain terms, with bold and bloody strokes!  These pathetically doomed Jews had hardened themselves to the proffered graciousness of Jehovah in Jesus, their Messiah, spanning forty years of mercy, tolerance, patience, and kindness by Israel’s God.  Their cup of wrath was now full and brimming over, recollecting, ironically, the fateful extermination of nations they themselves had started displacing some 15 centuries earlier.  When the Christians in Jerusalem beheld, even in reportedly awe-inspiring portents in the sky, what was looming, they fled in obedience to their Master’s warning a generation earlier and narrowly escaped the barely describable internecine slaughter that the imbedded Jewish reporter Flavius Josephus less squemishly recorded for the instruction of later generations.

For their murder of their own Savior Jerusalem paid with horrific suffering of brutal, merciless mutual savagery that beggars sober, much less polite, description.  Josephus is our window into this unleashing of divine retribution in his eye-witness account, The Wars of the Jews.

Yet for all that, it did not atone!  Their national destiny was irreversibly cut off.  The Covenant with Jewish Israel was over and done with, having been exhausted in the covenantal curses against her national ethnic disobedience, shockingly climaxing in their savage coup de ‘grâce’—hanging “the King of the Jews” on an inglorious gibbet for gawkers to mock, scorn, and shame.  This singular culminating crime sealed their spiraling doom. God henceforth would choose all who dare believe His ‘Emancipation Proclamation’ concerning Jesus to become “a chosen race, a ‘royal priesthood’, a ‘wholesome nation’, a procured people,” so that they “should be recounting the virtues of Him Who calls you out of darkness into His marvelous light, who once were ‘not a people’ yet are now the people God, who ‘have not enjoyed mercy’, yet now are ‘being shown mercy'” (1 Peter 2:9-10) and shall thereupon inherit allotments in His impending kingdom.  And in this way—that is, standing in faith (Rom. 11:20,23)—shall all Israel, that is, “true Israel” who do not remain stubborn to the Son be likewise saved and equally grafted and incorporated into the one body of Messiah.

Here, then, was authentic and well-deserved penal recompense, yes, divine avenging; yet ‘satisfaction’ scarcely covers the goods. Where does wholesome Scripture so much as allude to such outpourings of righteous indignation as ‘satisfying‘ to God, (i.e., as ‘paying off’ an accumulated debt of sin)?  Such tragedies are only cause for mourning, for the staggering losses seem irreversible.   “The indignation of God is getting revealed from heaven on all irreverence and injustice of humans who are retaining the truth in injustice“ (Rom. 1:18), as was pre-eminently the dubious state of highest spiritual privilege from which the ancient nation of Israel so ignominiously, shatteringly plummeted.  It may be mercifully delayed, yet not averted from stubbornly unrepentant sinners.

What certainly did ‘satisfy’ God was His Son’s obedience regardless of the torments inflicted by the ones his love sent him to save. Satan was remorseless and hopeless, so will suffer for the ages of the ages the torments of the Lake of Fire.  Human beings who refuse to accept God’s appointed means for getting rid of their sins will also be tormented commensurate with their sins and be ultimately consumed by the fires of judgment.  This is no small loss.  Some measure of it can be gauged by the “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 8:12; 13:42,50; 22:13; 24:51; 25:30; Luke 13:28) that attends the contemplation, while in the Unseen, of their own final extermination in light of what they might have gained—–agelong joy, life, glory, and rule over a new earth where no injustice will exist to diminish happiness.  What a loss!  What a destruction!  Yet HOW GREAT A SALVATION is awaiting those who keep on trusting and obeying!  [4/11/06]

“THE VICTORY OF THE CROSS”?

“The victory of the cross is not assured without the enlightening revelation of the Spirit of God” (Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition [Baker Academic, 2004] p. 150).  That dogmatic assertion, I submit to you, is passing strange indeed!  It shows how very far the mind of the Protestant Reformation (and Western atonement theology more generally) stands apart from the mind of Christ and his Spirit—the spirit of the New Covenant.  The victory of “the Cross” did not happen, properly speaking, at the Cross itself at all, but at the Resurrection!  Touché.

The Cross was a manifest failure since it did not save the Savior from death and the Unseen in the least.  Jesus’ ‘Saviorhood’ was deliberately unmanifest during his enigmatic crucifixion.  By no stretch of a hallowed imagination can that tragic violence be construed as ‘saving’, barring theological legerdemain. Yet because it is ineluctably linked to previous and subsequent events by a molecular logic of cosmic chemistry, therefore the product was predetermined:  VICTORIOUS RESURRECTION FROM AMONG THE DEAD!  Messiah’s getting crucified was an act of submissive obedience by the divine Son to his divine Father; it could only have a divine outcome—the vindication of that obedience by Resurrection, enthronement, and the outpouring of Wholesome Spirit to seal the adoption of future heirs.  But then we should speak of “the victory of The Obedience”!  Yet where, in theology, in sermon, in devotion, or in prayer, have you ever beheld that ‘odd’ conjunction of words or meditated that profoundly Biblical concept?  When and how did we start wandering off into the tangled underbrush of dessicated doctrines?

Therefore, properly speaking, Messiah’s cross manifested no victory that could be “assured,” as Boersma supposes, by so-called “enlightening revelation of the Spirit of God” or by any other means whatsoever.  We may better speak of the justification of the Cross becoming apparent in Messiah’s resurrectionary victory over death, Satan, sin, and every petty enemy.  But that victory has been attested and proclaimed by his well-instructed apostles long since.  This is our assurance and this has already long ago been corroborated and certified by “the enlightening revelation of the Spirit of God” that two millennia past inspired wholesome men to write it all down in detail in the wholesome Scriptures of the New Covenant for all the wholesome ones (“saints”) who come to believe the Message throughout remaining history until the Return.  What am I missing?  Didn’t Boersma get the memo?

The impulse that moved Hans Boersma to frame that opening sentence was, to be sure, the impossibility of seeing any victory in the Cross by any normal, rational means.  But that fact should have told him something and counseled his reticence before invoking a ‘supernatural’ crowbar to bust the lock on this ‘mystery’.  In point of fact, there is no longer any fundamental mystery about the proclamation of God’s Kingdom!  It was intended for secrecy only until Satan showed his vicious, violent hand against the Son of Mankind, which he would by no means have done if he had known God would reverse his murder by irreversible resurrection to communicable immortality!

God’s righteous anger against incorrigible sin cannot be averted from it.  Sins, rather, must be broken off us so that we do not die in their chokehold.  For unless this release from sins takes place, our wrongdoings will suck us down a black hole to God only knows where.

There is no ‘redeeming power’ in the Cross.  There is only liberating power in the heart of a strictly righteous God whose resurrectionary “avenging” the cross of Messiah evoked!  The power all belongs to, and issues from, the God of unremitting justice who did not let the sentence of crucifixion stand without virtually immediate reversal and colossal super-compensation!  HOORAY!!!

If the intolerable injustice of the Cross evoked the Resurrection of the Son by the Father, shouldn’t this fundamental evangelical pattern also get reflected in the case of diseases no less than sins?  The application of the innocent blood of God’s Lamb to our sinful hearts effects the ‘avenging’ of his wrongful death by the outpouring of new life into our hearts, thus giving us expectancy of agelong life in the impending age.  Why wouldn’t the application of his blood (figured in anointing the sick with oil, which likewise symbolizes the Wholesome Spirit poured out on or “paid out” to us in compensation for Satan’s pouring out the blood of God’s own Son) also effect restoration of health as well?  It follows so naturally.

VIOLENCE OR ASSERTIVENESS?

I’d like to reflect for a moment on Boersma’s category of ‘violence’.  When Jesus spoke of the so-called “violence” of those whom he commended for wanting to enter God’s Kingdom, he hardly meant violence in the Old Testament sense, and which God abhors in no uncertain terms and decisively condemns.  Rather, a comparison with the usage of this Greek family of words in the Septuagint Old Testament strongly (forcefully!) suggests that Jesus meant assertiveness, i.e., forcefulness.  This translation makes profound sense in light of the string of assertive people whose stories are narrated in the preceding chapters, following the ‘Sermon on the Mount’.

Today we even hear about assertiveness training to help the timid become more bold, outgoing, outspoken, and courageous in public and forceful in interpersonal relations.  ‘Violence’?  I don’t think so.  [4/4/06]

God’s ‘hospitality’ is reserved especially for those within the Covenants He made throughout history—that is, if we understand hospitality as God’s graciousness. But Boersma’s Calvinism, as expressed in his noteworthy book, has tied up this graciousness in endless litigation, speculating unjustifiably about its ‘supralapsarian’ reservation for only a few ‘sovereignly’, ‘irresistibly’, and ‘irreversibly’ elect individuals, as if this is graciousness at all!  Much rather, God’s true graciousness (‘sovereign’ is not even a biblical adjective!) allows all people onto the train of His Covenant so long as they trust Him (as manifested by their enduring repentance and obedience).  Otherwise they get thrown out of the train somewhere on route to the Kingdom, into outer darkness where there is no graciousness, but only anger—divine indignation.  This is well illustrated by God’s “drowning Pharaoh and his army because His lovingkindness [to Pharaoh’s would-be victims!] endures for the age” Psalm 136:15.  God exercises patience, toleration, longsuffering, kindness, and mercy even to Pharaoh and others outside His Covenant, including the sad case of defectors.  But His lovingkindness, covenantal troth, and graciousness are ours, alone, who keep trusting.

WHERE’S THE BLOOD?

Curiously, Boersma’s book does not have an index entry for “blood”!  This is some measure of how far from the metaphors of Scripture one can stray even in painstaking scholarly elaborations.  “Blood” is simply the most pivotal and pervasive word associated with every category of salvation in the New Testament.  Ponder that!  Better yet, prove me wrong, if you dare.  [4/4/06]