Can God FORGIVE debts without GETTING PAID BACK FOR them?

Was it really a profound sense of God’s “holiness,” “majesty,” and “honor” that moved Anselm to propose a theory of the Atonement that made it impossible for God to forgive debts unless He got paid back for them? Or was it a profoundly impaired sense? Is it possible that Anselm is depicting a deity suffering from Anselm’s own forgiveness-challenged medieval image of humanity, or at least of the prevalent social order? This is no “majestic” deity but a Scrooge. We might even expect such a god to demand from an indebted humanity high interest on his loan of three score and ten years of “totally depraved” lifetime. Ah, but there I’m anticipating John Calvin by some four centuries. So back to the 12^th century…

How profound an honor is one that, when wounded, does not take extenuating circumstances or good intentions into account, much less exerts a noble mercy on the weak and infirm slaves of dark powers, but demands the last farthing. No, not a Scrooge’s, but a Simon Legree’s!

Furthermore, how profound a holiness is it that cannot spare a measure of healing, restoration, or life to pathetic, miserable mortals without expecting it all back? Could such a god be the Creator and Origin of such a universe as we behold on every hand—the One who will one glorious day be at long last “all in all”?

What clues had Anselm gathered regarding the majesty, honor, and holiness of the God who actually is there? A taste for his time-bound, culturally relative, and all-too-crabbed theology of atonement must be an acquired one; I seriously doubt it could ever come ”natural” to someone deeply familiar with and committed to the conceptual accuracy of Biblical Explanation.

Emil Brunner is said to have declared that “punishment is the expression of the divine law and order, of the inviolability of the divine order of the world” (The Mediator, p. 449, as quoted in John W. Stott, The Cross of Christ [IVP, 1986], p. 123). Surely this is a limping, lopsided, and benighted angle on God’s will as expressed in His giving of, e.g., the Torah to Moses.

God’s desire is that we grow into His likeness by obeying His explicit written norms, in the face of temptations to violate them in order to acquire life and goods in the wrong way. If this is the plan, then punishment can only have a distinctly subsidiary role simply to keep things on track. But forgiveness is a most prominent factor with an indispensable role, without which the process has insufficient “stretch” to make room for learning, trial (!), and error (!)…in other words, GROWTH! Thus Brunner’s notion of “inviolability” is seen to hold a dysfunctional and unbiblical prominence in his thought. For is “law” somehow more “the expression of the will of the Lawgiver, of the personal God” (p. 459; p. 123 in Stott) than forgiveness, which must ever attend its human, i.e., supple and effectual and merciful use? Such an emphasis makes God’s program of human maturation wobble way out of balance…dangerously so for human health and wellbeing. [10/26/07]

What was Messiah (indeed, “God in Messiah) doing on the Cross if not “DENYING HIMSELF”?!  John Stott denies that God could possibly do such a thing because “he cannot and will not “deny himself.” But the issue turns on different senses of the expression. Indeed, if there is to be a proper ethical response to God’s own gracious revelation of character at His Son’s cross and resurrection, then GOD MUST BE DISPLAYING EXACTLY THIS TRAIT WHICH HE, IN MESSIAH, “COMMANDED US TO DO” (Stott, Cross of Christ, p. 128).