Christ’s exuberant self-sacrifice willingly embraced the wild card factor–Love’s Labor Lost

A premial understanding of the Atonement upholds the only proper relations among the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  It is therefore the only authentically “trinitarian” position on the topic of these relationships, regardless of the long, convoluted history of the traditional “orthodox” formulation.  With the virtually total loss of this ancient understanding of God’s justice as premial in the case of Jesus, the work of Jesus and the work of the Holy Spirit too often became torn asunder, and the motives of the Father and the Son became dissonant with one another.  No amount of “trinitarian” whitewash could mask these internal rifts within Deity, since the very essentials of the Gospel itself had become obscured and forgotten in their true import.  The core message of the original, apostolic, premial proclamation about the Lord Jesus Christ must dictate the contours of the relations among the Deity revealed in the Biblical Scriptures.  Any other approach to the subject must be speculative and inconclusive, to say the least.  [9/9/10]

When Jesus declared, “I have kept my Father’s directives and remain in His love” (John 15:9-10), he was enunciating exactly what the author of Hebrews declared in other words, “In the graciousness of God he should be tasting death for everyone” (Hebrews 2:9).  Ergo:  Jesus Christ our Lord never suffered the wrath of God in any respect, but ever stayed in God’s love and graciousness, even while on the cross, yes, even in Hades.  No, never, ever was he outside of his Father’s favor!  From this striking though paradoxical fact (for so it most certainly is in the truest literary sense of “paradox”:  something that seems to be otherwise than it actually is) we can take our supreme comfort when facing the excruciating depths of our own trials–GOD IS FOR US!  We submit to our Father’s WILL, NOT HIS WRATH.  [9/9/10]

Christ’s exuberant self-sacrifice, in determined obedience to his Father’s plan for victory, necessarily embraced the wild card factor of love’s labor lost on multitudes of Adam’s children.  Yet we behold just such superabundant “wastage” spread abroad throughout the entire created order.  The analogies are profound and striking.  Anders Nygren seems to have observed this factor in his idea of “lost love,” i.e., of Christ’s sacrifice being trampled by selfishness, yet coming back triumphant and omnipotent.  [9/9/10]

Paul urges everyone to be conciliated to God, because everyone was alienated from Him.

It is our responsibility to be conciliated to God because it is we who became alienated from Him! (Se Paul Peter Waldenström’s illustration from marriage, drawn from 1 Corinthians 7:11—p. 106 in The Reconciliation.) God has demonstrated and displayed His absence of enmity by letting His beloved Son be murdered without immediate reprisal, but instead declared clemency and pardon and extended superabounding graciousness—giving His very own Holy Spirit to all who believe the Proclamation! [12/08/07]

The well-known tension between God’s “justice” and His “love” has its source primarily in the misunderstanding of His “justice” as “penal” exclusively. Such a “justice” demands a counterweight to balance out the divine attributes. But this tension turns out to be pernicious ad subversive of the unity and consistency of God’s character and activities.

Much rather, God’s justice is both restorative toward the righteous and punitive toward the vicious. The justice/righteousness of God’s character controls and conditions all else that He is and does; it is the normativity that determines the harmony of all His characteristics.

Hence, to have grasped (what is sufficiently illustrated all over the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures) that God’s justice is predominantly restorative would be to have pre-empted the impulse to “balance” it with “love” since to restore the losses of the righteous is itself an expression of love and needs no supplementation. Yet this profound truth cannot become properly clear until and unless the resurrection of Christ is grasped as the supreme manifestation of God’s justice historically. This simply has not been seen because of the veil of darkness thrown around the topic by the “penal substitution” dogma of Western orthodoxies. For there the Resurrection is a mere afterthought—a drone doctrine! Thereby the Resurrection has been rendered inert and feckless. [12/12/07]

Anders Nygren’s insistence that although the Hebrew scriptures attribute justice to God, the Christian scriptures do not (acc. Nicholas Wolterstorff in “Justice of God,” in For Faith and Clarity: Philosophical Contributions to Christian Theology, pp. 180-81, ed. By James K. Beilby [Baker, 2006]) is obviously premised on the Lutheran (and Reformed) blindspots concerning Paul’s use of “the righteousness of God” as meaning “the justice of God” because of the Reformation’s substitute of “the righteousness of Christ” where God’s own justice belongs. [12/12/07]

The belief that there is “no alternative” but to believe in penal substitution in order to be faithful to the “cross” is a STRONG DELUSION. Now why do you suppose Satan would be so ardent to represent the situation in these colors, hmm? [12/12/07]