PENAL SUBSTITUTION: Systematizing the Deception

It is not by accident that penal substitution has gained such prominence in Protestant Christianity. It has succeeded in systematizing the deception (Eph. 4:14-15) that God’s penal justice could actually somehow bring salvation, while it completely suppressed the voice of God’s premial justice that constitutes the authentic golden thread of divine salvation throughout wholesome Scripture. How the boa constrictor of Calvin’s rigorously novel theory of penal substitution could have strangled the Pauline proclamation of God’s resurrectionary justice toward the Lord Jesus can perhaps only be accounted for by the power of the sinful fleshly impulse toward personal avenging in combination with steady steps of systematic rationalizations that undermined sound exegetical treatments of key passages, all while cross-wiring them in new patterns that were both more amenable to fleshly dispositions of mind, less challenging to faith in a God of miracles, less demanding of obedience to the directives of the Lord Jesus, and less inclined to the example of his obedience to the death of a cross. Jesus became a weak substitute rather than a mighty Lord and a commanding Leader. [6/8/11;5/17/24]

God’s surrender of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, was not as a payment of our human debt of sin; if anything, IT ENORMOUSLY AGGRAVATED THE DEBT! IT SWELLED THE SIN OF ISRAEL TO THE BURSTING POINT! If there was any possible hope for Israel to make payment for her many sins (especially of slaying the prophets), by her own righteous deeds, it was utterly BANKRUPTED and totally demolished by the summum malum of CRUCIFYING JESUS! This was not a “deposit” into their “heavenly account” but a massive OVERDRAFT!

The direct implication of this stark fact is that God’s plan for the salvation of Israel, indeed, of all humankind, entailed and demanded THE MOST PATENTLY OBVIOUS DEBT FORGIVENESS EVER UNDERTAKEN IN HISTORY! (And we, in turn, are to forgive as our heavenly Father has thus forgiven us!) The Cross was the last straw; so little did this crime “pay off” God’s penal justice for any human sins (whether of “the elect” or the whole world) that, to the contrary, it greatly compounded human sin, yet happily evoked God’s own personal REPAYMENT to Jesus for his colossal loss. This is the astonishing way the Gospel actually works, contrary to the longstanding but novel traditions of the ‘magisterial’ Protestant Reformation. [6/8/11; 5/17/24]

Penal substitution THROWS STUMBLING BLOCKS AND SNARES BEFORE PEOPLE, thus injuring faith and the credibility of the Message about Jesus Christ. In particular, it is subversive of the character of God the Father. It perversely rationalizes the Atonement according to a strictly penal model that is inherently and irremediably offensive. With excruciating irony, the penal satisfaction accounting of the assassination of God the Son amounts to a character assassination of God the Father, unintentional though is always appears to be. [6/10/11; 5/17/24]

“GOD IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SATISFY, BUT EASY TO PLEASE.” — George MacDonald, quoted in Jan Karon, In the Company of Others (New York: J. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2010).

God’s true love was expressed by rescuing us from Satan’s raging hatred and transferring us into the benign kingdom of the Son of His love.

The fundamental and crucial indirection of the penal substitution opinion that Christ’s death “under God’s wrath” was somehow actually an act of “love” to and for sinners is matched and overmatched by the authentic apostolic teaching that Christ’s death under Satan’s rage and fury was the true and genuine act of love to and for sinners because it manifestly won God’s overwhelming approval, good pleasure, and graciousness for Christ by means of God’s justice historically raising him from the dead thereby justifying and securing for him the promised gift of the Holy Spirit as his rightful just award, which he could dispense gratuitously, in turn, to poor sinners in desperate need of the wealth of Heaven to reverse their otherwise fateful plight on earth and cleanse their sins away into oblivion. [5/27/11; 5/16/24]

TAKE COVER UNDER CHRIST

The Atonement is all about getting shielded, getting sheltered, or taking cover “in Christ,” whose absolute unintermittent existence under God’s graciousness qualifies him as the ultimate safety (ΣΩΤΗΡΙΑ) net, as well as a protective cover (ΊΛΑΣΤΗΡΙΟΝ) under which believing sinners can rest secure from God’s indignation against any residual failures on their part. However, it is not designed to ‘avert’ that warth per se, but rather to protect the fallible saint against its expression and, in fact, to actually counteract the remanent sinfulness within the still-mortal believer by the power of the Holy Spirit won by Christ’s success. [6/2/11/ 5/16/24]

“Penal substitution” might one day be kindly remembered as an interim theory of the Atonement until something better came along. Of course, its loyal adherents have no expectation whatever that something better could possibly come along (or had ever existed, quite contrary to the facts). This, naturally, puts them in an awkward position when it inevitably does come along (or get rediscovered) since they are heavily invested in defending the penal hypothesis against all comers of whatever stripe. They are quite confident (overconfident) that no other solution is even possible or desirable, much less absolutely necessary! Thus they instruct their young would-be apologists, and thus their error gets recycled for another round of endless reruns to recruit new fans to the cult. So the blind lead the blind into a predictable tragic scenario.

Premial justice is the flip side of the penal justice imagined to be operational in the Atonement. In fact, however, no penal justice on God’s part was exerted at all during the Atonement process. Atonement was effected, much rather, exclusively by God’s rewarding Jesus with what was his extraordinary due in response to (in “exchange” for) the unjust abuse he voluntarily endured to win that judicial award of damages from God for us! [6/3/11; 5/16/24]

The ways that people can do good “for [the sake]” or “on behalf” of others veritably beggar description and certainly transcend the notion of “substitution”! To read this ideologically narrowed and morally attenuated idea into the work of Christ on earth (much less of God in heaven!) is to impoverish it and, in turn, to crimp its exemplary power as well, and so denature the Christian ethic altogether. [6/3/11; 5/16/24]

IN Christ was NO SIN, consequently, ON Christ was NO DIVINE WRATH. End of discussion.

We can be grateful for C. H. Dodd’s inexplicable lapses of citations in his famous treatment of כפר and ΊΛΑΣΤΗΡΙΟΝ (“atone“) in the Septuagint (LXX) and some other ancient literature. The odd incompleteness of his scholarship roused his theological opponents to a more thorough examination of Scripture (both Hebrew and LXX) along with especially Hellenistic Jewish authors such as Philo and Josephus. The delightfully ironic upshot of this adversarial exploration and mutual critique would appear to be at least a partial, yet strong, vindication of Dodd’s controversial conclusions. This is the more persuasive precisely because the complementary investigations were performed by scholars with contrary assumptions. Clearly, there was no sympathetic collusion between these antithetic parties. So, what we learn from both skeins, taken together, is of heightened impartiality and interest even today as we pursue a comparison of both positions with the independent research of, e.g., Adolph E. Knoch, who, though an active contemporary, was not a public participant in the historic controversy. [5/20/11; 5/14/24]

Every time an Israelite lay hands on a sacrificial beast’s head he was confessing he had a hand in its death and likewise, prophetically, in the slaying of the “Lamb of God,” their own Messiah and Savior, God’s own Son. That ritual act was, ipso facto, their confession of sin (in the sin[-offering]) and guilt (in the guilt[-offering]), and similarly at Passover (mid-April), the Day of Sheltering (“Atonement,” mid-Ocrober, 6 months later), and the daily morning and evening sacrifices. [5/23/11; 5/14/24]

In Christ was no sin, therefore, on Christ could come no divine wrath. For this reason he constituted the ideal protective cover, shielding, or shelter (כפרת; ΊΛΑΣΤΗΡΙΟΝ) concerning sins; only divine graciousness could issue toward him from above. Therefore, all who are included in Christ by faith (depicted by baptism) are continuously in God’s graciousness that Christ supremely deserves as the fruit of his faithful obedience to his Father through all, and exceedingly severe, tests. Consequently, all who remain in Christ stay safe from God’s indignation against their sins. To his blood, which represents his soul or sentient existence, is attributed his faithfulness, which deserved not only his Fther’s graciousness, but also a very great just award (ΔΙΚΑΙΩΜΑ) from God’s just judgment. This award, the Holy Spirit, comes, therefore, as a gift to all who likewise exert faith in God’s Explanation of this saving Proclamation, which is God’s power for salvation. Christ’s resurrection was the heavenly seal of God’s favor/graciousness toward him. The superexcessive magnitude of that graciousness is meant for our benefit as otherwise hopeless sinners with no escape from the fate of death that Adam’s sin consigned us to. The grace of Christ’s resurrection is our confident entree into God’s graciousness as well. [5/25/11]

God could not have used the exceedingly slow process of evolution to create life forms for the simple (but true) reason that he sent His Son to earth in the form of Jesus and commissioned him to heal and cure and restore diseased, maimed people instantaneously. Furthermore, Jesus, in turn, commissioned his apostles and other disciples to do likewise in order to validate his Proclamation of salvation from death. Moreover, Jesus was raised from among the dead by God as a powerful sign to confirm our own future destiny if we endure faithful to him and his message. What is the likelihood that a God of such amazing power and care for His creatures would employ such a clumsy, improbable method as evolution to construct beings that He could reconstruct in moments? Not a chance. It’s utterly inconceivable to a normal mind. Salvation is re-creation, not re-evolution. [5/26/11; 5/14/24]

The very narrative of Scripture, in addition to the explicit declarations of God to human beings, reveals the regularities of God’s behavior and the “necessities” entailed by His character traits. These are often a far cry from the orthodox teachings that have been the stock-in-trade of theology. A storyline can reveal, as no amount of abstract theology can, the nuances of God’s behavior over multiple generations, and it can fill otherwise abstruse words with human-scale meanings and relatable contents. The so-called “demands,” “requirements,” and “necessities” of such presumed staples as God’s “[penal!] justice,” look very different from the narrative standpoint of wholesome Scripture than they do from the abstruse angle of scholastic theology. [5/26/11]

Jehovah & Son, Inc. is our INSURANCE CARRIER

The Lord Jesus Christ, by bearing (phor-/pher-) his people’s (Israel’s) sins and offering (prosphor- /prospher-) himself to God on behalf of the transgressions of others, thereby became the indemnification or “insurance carrier” for them. [5/6/11]

Isaiah’s words (53:4), “We esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted,” is a stunning echo—A THUNDERCLAP!—of the Book of Job. For all of Job’s “comforters” FALSELY IMPUTED SIN TO JOB IN THE VERY SAME WAY. And such imputation was exposed by God as SIN! He demanded sacrifices for such wickedly bad accounting! Furthermore, God SUPERCOMPENSATED Job for his unjust suffering of abusive reviling as well as of his physical pains. [5/6/11]

“He said that He would exterminate them, except that Moses, His chosen one, stood in the breach before Him, to turn back His fury from bringing ruin [on them].” Psalm 106:23 (Exodus 32:7-14, 30-35; Deuteronomy 9:14, 25-29; Ezekiel 20)

If even Moses, by his intercession, could turn back God’s wrath or indignation from destroying the poeple for their sins, then it seems plausible that the expenditure of God’s anger is not some absolute necessity, and He may indeed—as Moses pled for—show mercy instead. The rationale that somewhere, “somewhen,” He must “nevertheless” expend that treasured-up wrath “in order to ‘pay for’ those sins” is, to be sure, beyond mere conjecture; it is downright blasphemy! For it imputes a “deeper” motive than “mere” mercy; it alleges some primal, cosmic need to vent wrath against every sin “before” and “so that” he can be gracious! SUCH TEACHING BREEDS SUSPICION AND DREAD TOWARD GOD OF A SORT THAT UNDERMINES OUR WHOLEHEARTED ATTACHMENT TO “OUR FATHER IN HEAVEN.” IN FACT IT CAN CRIMP AND POSSIBLY PARALYZE OUR WORSHIP OF HIM!

The authentic Biblical teaching concerning God’s justice, however, displays perfect harmony with His mercy, longsuffering, kindness, patience, and, ultimately, His love. God’s final goal is human maturity in love, and He bends every effort (and every “rule”) to insure the attainment of that goal. This means that not only are we to forgive one another’s sins (which is right and just) but SO MUST GOD! If He is to be our model for just and upright behavior, and if Jesus was the perfect exhibit of that behavioral model in earthly flesh, then no hidden agenda, no “deeper motive” of “penal payment” hiding in the wings as His special prerogative, is in the least possible in such a universe. So be assured, and behave accordingly…God be with you! [5/7/11; 5/11/24]

Ancient sacrificial blood testified to God’s justification, by resurrection to immortality, of Christ’s sinlessly just soul. THUS DID GOD AVENGE HIS MURDER IN PEACE.

Select points summarized from The Blood of Jesus (translated from Swedish, 1888) by Paul Peter Waldenström:

Cleansing from sin effected by the blood of Jesus, not by his death (p. 6)

Not as “a perfect value before God as a payment for man’s indebtedness through sin” (p. 7)

Not by “faith in” the blood, but the blood itself cleanses (p. 7)

Not “the value of the blood in the sight of God” cleanses from sin, but the blood itself (p. 7)

Not a word about “the blood of Christ being a payment to God for our sins” / nor the Old Testament sacrifices as such a payment (p. 7) [4/13/11]

CHRIST’S RESURRECTION:

Pre-empted immediate avenging of Jesus’ unlawful execution upon his killers

Made peace without violence on the part of God and Jesus

Justified God and Christ before the world

Proved the graciousness of God in spite of human viciousness

Proved that God had all along been conciliatory toward mankind

Proved that God rescues the righteous against all odds

Proved that Christ’s crucifixion was unjust in the extreme

Proved that Christ never suffered God’s wrath at all

Proved that God was more intent on repaying His Son with life superabundant than on repaying his slayers with death…pending their hopeful turnabout

Proved that God Himself was bearing the capital sin of His Son’s crucifixion instead of avenging and retaliating, hence making God a full Partner in human salvation

Constituted God’s ransoming of Jesus from death and the Unseen (hades), i.e., from the culmination of human sin against Him

Proved that the wrath so evident at the Cross must have been diabolical rather than divine

Proved that God did not forsake His Son [in the Unseen (hades)] after all

Proved that the cross was not an exhibit of how much God hated sin but of how much humans hated righteousness

Constituted God’s rejoinder to that hatred. They penalized Christ with death, which they alone deserved; God rewarded him, in starkest contrast, with what he truly deserved—immortality, graciously more than compensating him for his abuse-taking! [4/14/11]

The fact (!) that the actual rationale for blood sacrifices is never given in the Old Testament should have given a good many more Protestant theologians pause before improvising and imposing one of their own devising (concerning an alleged penal payment to God for sin). By the time of the New Testament, it finally dawned that this puzzling silence had been strategic, in order to protect the antitype from sabotage by Satan—clever Devil that he is—the very enemy to be irreversibly overturned by the coming sacrifice! That the extremely surprising significance of the sacrifices for sin should happen to have resurrectionary content was at least hinted at by the diverse uses of sacrificial blood in the Old Testament scriptures, for it had unusual powers inexplicable on any other basis. The power to release from, cleanse from, wash away, and atone for, sins should have been strong clues, but its power to heal and cure leprosy was yet more suggestive. These capabilities all point to the power of the holy/wholesome, hence life-making, Spirit of Christ unveiled at his resurrection from the dead (in perfect continuity with his manifest powers to heal sickness, release sins and even revive the dead during his ministry following his baptism by John with the Holy Spirit at the Jordan River), and further distributed at Pentecost to all his loyal brethren. Accordingly, sacrificial blood testifies to God’s justification (through resurrection) of Christ’s innocent—in fact utterly sinless—blood, representing Christ’s just and righteous soul. Thus did God AVENGE HIS MURDER IN PEACE for all who believe it, (but in eventual, mercifully delayed wrathful destruction for the unalterably stubborn). [4/14/11; 4/23/24]

It was through the representative priesthood of Israel that her accumulated treasury of sin was ritually focused once for all upon the final SIN[-offering], whose lifeblood was avenged by God Himself reversing the crime with a just repayment of superabundant life for him, and then by him was further distributed freely for the salvation of all who believe this Proclamation.

What does the Scripture mean that Christ “himself carries up [anaphero] our sins in his body on to the pole [xulon, timber]” (1 Peter 2:24)? That is, how did he “carry up“/”bear” more than the sins only of those who surrounded him him to abuse and crucify him? The answer must take account of the priesthood of Israel whose complicity in his slaying constituted a representative act. Thereby, the whole nation of Israel was implicated in the Levitical sin[-offering] of murder—public, official murder, nothing less. Accordingly, Peter poignantly includes himself in the “our sins,” concerning which he must also have reflected with fresh compunction upon his individual sin of personally denying Jesus three times during his trial before the Sanhedrin.

The author of the Hebrews treatise supplies the only other New Testament instance of the expression in 9:28: “Thus Christ also, being offered once for the bearing [anaphero] [of the] sins of many….” This passage, again, may have in view primarily, if not exclusively, the sins of Israel, God’s unfaithful covenant partner, and not the sins of the others who afflicted Christ in his final days (Herod, Pilate, and the Roman soldiers), much less the entire human race. Both Hebrews and 1 Peter may be focused primarily on concerns of largely Jewish-Christian congregations, and the above interpretation would make eminent sense within that milieu. In any case, Isaiah’s echo in these verses was surely not intended as fodder for Calvinistic ‘particular election’ speculation regarding the “many,” as distinct from “the whole world” (which 1 John 2:1-2 and many other passages are correctly concerned to highlight in connection with, e.g., atonement, conciliation, and ransom). [3/19-20/11; 4/19-21/24]

That said, the question will reflexively arise in the minds of Evangelicals, “But didn’t Christ bear the sins of the whole world?” Well, I would poiint out, neither of the New Testament texts that use the expression suggest that he was bearing the sins of the world there, nor do the words in Isaiah 53:11-12 (which Hebrews clearly echoes) suggest, much less demand, such a construction. The purview of Isaiah 52:13-53:12 is exclusively Israel. God chose Jacob/Israel and the nation of his descendants as a paradigm for all other nations whom God wished to instruct and save by the example of that covenantal relationship, which He would one day throw open to all comers when it was renewed to perfection by His Son Jesus.

The only reason why these passages in Isaiah, Hebrews, and 1 Peter have been stretched by force to include a larger pool of guilty humanity is that the penal hypothesis teaches that Christ’s work at the cross was a substitutionary suffering of God’s wrath as “payment” for the sins of others, so to be complete it must have to encompass not only those present and active in that execution, not only the ancient nation of Israel represented by the priesthood, corrupt though it was, but must also have included all the “elect” (Calvin), or even all humanity (Arminius, et al). However, on a premial view of the matter any wider inclusiveness in this specific context of sin-bearing is not only an exegetically unwarranted, but is systematically unnecessary. In point of fact, it is ruled out altogether, and emphatically. for within the premial explanation of salvation the cross was a towering crime that, in view of the worthiness of its flawlessly holy, just, obedient, indeed sinless, Victim, demanded extraordinary reparations. Therefore, the weight of universalizing its saving efficacy beyond any circumscribed limit of this specific historic event of sin-bearing rests on God the Judge, Who, in lieu of the unacceptable prospect of widespread penal devastation, opted for cosmically outsized restitution to the Lord Jesus Christ instead. Accordingly, God justly repaid the injured Party so overwhelmingly that he could graciously invite the whole blamed world into the Party, too! He didn’t miserly “pay” to forgive merely an arbitrarily “predestined” selection so as not to “waste his limited resources” and show Himself improvident and prodigal before the eyes of the watching world. Nay, much rather, He threw caution to the wind and threw fresh capital at the grand Salvation Enterprise like it was going out of style! Sad to say, however, God’s style of munificence did evidently go out of style rather too early in church history and got traded for a miserably perverted and impoverished substitute by way of punitive rhetorical sophistry, and has never recovered its native vigor and comprehensive compass of application to this day. Yet with all the best intentions, it would seem, despite the incongruous, even defamatory, irony. But the time is now long overdue to assess the colossal losses the world has suffered by this sabotage of God’s Proclamation with an insipid substitutionary ideology. An Enemy has done this, but payback time seems imminent. [4/21-22/24]

The Cross in conjunction with the Resurrection proved that God had never been non-conciliatory. Those events were the ultimate revelation of the way God had perpetually felt. at heart. That dimension contributes to their power to conciliate sinful humanity even down to our own age. [3/21/11; 4/19/24]

Penal Satisfaction champions are predisposed to declare that although human beings are expected to forgive others without seeking satisfaction or payment in return, God is represented differently since He declares “Mine is vengeance, I will repay, says the Lord.” Thus, He can be expected to demand repayment before He can forgive debts. Yet when it appears evident from the New Testament, to the contrary, that God must be an exception then, since His invitation through the apostles to “be conciliated [katallasso] to God!” (2 Corinthians 5:21) remains unalterably unilateral, implying no need for conciliation from His side, they hasten to reiterate that He (or His character, His honor, His holiness, or His justice), after all, still does demand to be appeased, pacified, satisfied, and conciliated before He can become conciliatory in return. They seem to want it both ways, regardless of Scriptures flying in the face of their prejudices. How about a show of candor here! A Janus-faced God has no appeal to honest hearts. [3/22/11; 4/22/24]

God has always been and always will be indignant against the stubborn buildup of deliberate sins. The Atonement has not changed that fact one iota. It has not pacified, appeased, placated, propitiated, or reconciled God in any way. It was designed to accomplish one supreme goal: doing away with human sin—the offending factor that causes alienation in the first place. It does so by supplying the renewing power of the Holy Spirit in order to shed abroad God’s own love in the hearts of all who gratefully believe His Proclamation of graciousness in and to and through the Lord Jesus Christ, who then graciously mediates it freely to them. In other words, God, in effect, conciliates human beings to Himself! Christ made the supreme sacrifice to win from his Father a graciousness of global application, including release from sins, effected by the Holy Spirit bestowed upon our faith on account of Christ’s own flawless faithfulness toward God. [3/27/11]

When we say that Jesus died under the fury of Satan and not the wrath of God, we can conceive of a Penal Substitution advocate objecting, “But that would mean Jesus was satisfying the justice of Satan, which is absurd!” Now, given their “satisfaction” premise, we would have to agree! However, their inference is but a reflex of the Penal Satisfaction ideological system itself, not a consequence of the Bible’s own logic concerning the Atonement by any stretch. For although according to the penal ideology Jesus suffers God’s wrath in payment for our debt of sins in order to satisfy God’s stern “justice” (so-called), yet the apostolic logic instead views Christ’s suffering of furious abuse by Satan as precisely a heinous violation of God’s justice (the premial aspect, naturally, of which he was most eminently deserving), that is, a crime demanding an ultimate Atonement—through a suitably vindicating resurrection from among the dead to a triumphantly culminating exaltation upon the throne of the created universe: the quintessential avenging for the shedding of his transcendently innocent blood. [3/28/11]

To deny the diabolical evil of the Cross is to dessicate the divine justification for the Resurrection! By the same token, to attribute justification itself to the Cross is to steal outright from God’s credit in raising its Victim from the dead! There can be no middle path, no compromise or blend of these irreconcilable opposites. The very notion eviscerates the potency and dims the glory of justification, hardly less so than its universal Protestant attribution to the dread event of the crucifixion, from which Jesus’ sinlessness cried out for justice “better than [the justness of] Abel” (Hebrews 11:4, 12:24) possibly could!. It is confusion—a double-minded, barely lukewarm hesitancy to boldly embrace its unequivocally resurrectionary, and hence judicially premial, significance wholeheartedly. From all the above bewilderment may God graciously deliver and pardon us so that we may yet bring our well-intended praise to its proper Object for the salutary enlightenment of our befuddled sensibilities. [3/29/11; 4/20-22/24]

Teachers in the church may reap the whirlwind by portraying God as PERPETUALLY WRATHFUL against all sin, per se, rather than as INCREASINGLY INDIGNANT against hard-heartedness, stubbornness, uncorrigibility, and unrepentance. It’s complicated.

To be sure, Anselm of Canterbury (1033/4-1109) inaugurated the most serious declension of atonement theology up to his time. But a more decisive tipping point came with John Calvin (1509-1564), born four centuries after Anselm’s death. It was he who “penalized” or “criminalized” Anselm’s doctrine of civil or honorial (feudal) satisfaction into something barely shy of diabolical in its representation of God, the Father. [3/7/11]

The justification doctrine of Faustus Socinus (1539-1604) actually functions powerfully and quite effectually in spite of its deficiency regarding the indispensable operation of the Holy Spirit—i.e., as the “payoff” (in part) of Christ’s suffering abuse—by virtue of the fact that the Gospel itself includes this reality in Christian practice anyway. Deficient beliefs and theologies do not totally crimp the power of the Spirit (depending, of course, on whether or not there are any built-in quenching or grieving, much less blasphemous, factors present). Socinus by no means excluded “the promise of the Holy Spirit, to be obtained by all believers,” the source and substance of all the blessings of God’s kingdom, for “[s]ince the Old Covenant lacks and lacked all these, and offered an earthly felicity, the superiority of the New Covenant can be easily recognized at this point” (pp. 32-3 in Themata de Officio Christi*).

*Robert Franks, A History of the Doctrine of the Work of Christ (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2001) 373-74; originally titled The Work of Christ: A Historical Study of Christian Doctrine (Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1962). [3/8/11]

The power of Martin Luther’s Reformation is illustrative of how truly transformative is a recognition of the premial side of God’s justice, for even though he misunderstood that the phrase, “God’s righteousness,” as Paul employs it, referred to God the Father’s rather than to Jesus the Son’s, still, the premial insight nonetheless shone through and proved incomparably gripping and life-changing. What wonders might ensue whenever we should happen to get this feature even more recognizably correct and better integrated? [3/9/11]

When penal substitution advocates preach that we “shouldn’t expect” penal substitution to show up in the parable of the prodigal son, since Jesus was actually making “another point” there (despite the prominent role of forgiveness, which they deviantly allege is inextricably dependent upon our heavenly Father’s exacting full, complete, even exhaustive punishment and payment from an innocent substitute), then either the conscience-stricken hearer slinks away, troubled in soul, thinking, “I knew it! I just knew it! God is, at bottom, still remorselessly vengeful after all!” or perhaps the chafing, embittered listener, licking wounds or meditating losses from wrongful injuries, turns away with tesolve to keep holding a grudge “like our Father in Heaven does.” Such crabbed attitudes then get embedded in the Christian psyche where they secretly lie in wait to burst forth under sufficient pressure, like conditioned responses at misopportune moments, and forcibly quench any stray impulse from the Holy Spirit that might prompt behavior more in line with what Jesus seems to be teaching about the graciousness of his Father. Do our heedless pulpiteers have any idea of the whilrwind they may reap by peddling such naively off-center notions so glibly to their audiences? [7/12/11; 3/27/24]