Is an Exhibit of Penal Substitution the Best God Can Do to Demonstrate the Pinnacle of His Justice to the Human Race?

The persistence of the penal substitution opinion concerning the Atonement is one of the most resounding evidences of the depravity of theologians that it is possible to contemplate. It salves our fallenness as few other religious beliefs can do, for it is staunchly defended (all too human though it is) as a reflection of God’s own supreme justice! The sullied character of God Almighty, the Heavenly Father Himself, then gets blithely invoked to justify our own carnally vindictive attitudes. Our corrupt vengefulness is projected onto our faulty image and impression of the Supreme Judge while we, in turn, feel justified in inflicting it upon our neighbors and, more widely, upon our fellow citizenry, not to mention our national enemies, “without and within.”

To those theologians whose response to such criticism is to hurl the invidious accusation, “You just think you’re better than those who teach penal substitution!” we reply with a question: “Is a repentant teacher better than an unrepentant teacher?” [8/3/11; 12/11/24]

The stupendous, yea, nuclear overcompensation of graciousness released earthward in divine exchange for the incalculable viciousness of the Cross, was intended by God precisely to blow all unworthy calculations concerning divine reprisals to KINGDOM COME! But we Protestants all, whether Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, Calvinists, Lutherans, et al, have become catechized, trained, accustomed, habituated, acclimated, or otherwise perfectly adapted to and “carefully taught” the low, debased calculations of PENAL SATISFACTION, and like addicts we experience withdrawal symptoms of psychic destabilization when our pathological crutch is kicked out from under that tottering superstructure. [8/4/11; 12/11/24]

“The cup indeed which I am drinking shall you be drinking, and with the baptism with which I am getting baptized shall you be baptized.” Mark 10:39

If this declaration of Jesus is correct, we can scarcely hold that the Lord’s cup was “the cup of God’s wrath” (as penal satisfaction proponents nevertheless insist) lest James and John be alleged to taste likewise of God’s wrath! For what “penal satisfying” end would that serve, if we may inquire? No, far from it! That was the cup of Satanic affliction, fury, and wrath, concerning which the Lord Jesus prewarned and prepared his followers, and for good reason! For as sheep among wolves, we are privileged to partake of the sufferings of our Lord in kind (though not in measure). [8/8/11; 12/10-11/24]

Simply because the ancient Levitical priesthood was authorized by God through Moses’s direction to employ a host of symbols and symbolic procedures—and therefore, in turn, God might later freely overrule them so as to pre-empt their being mistaken as operating automatically or mechanically—does not imply that these implements, substances, and actions were somehow arbitrary, insignificant, or alterable in their heyday. Such an attitude would debase their discernible and consistent meaning, which is so essential for identifying them with their future New Covenant manifestations and ultimate fulfilments. [8/8/11; 12/10-11/24]

SINNING IS A SYMPTOM OF HUMAN MORTALITY. [8/16/11; 12/9/24]

GOD SAVES US BY HIS JUSTICE TO JESUS.

In other words, because God rescued Jesus from death-by-crucifixion at the hands of wicked Jews and Romans, we too can be saved from the finality of death, because God’s reward to him in exchange for his voluntary submission to such wrongful abuse, especially in view of his actual status as God’s unique Son and Israel’s Messiah, was so superabundant, via resurrectionary restitution, that the benefits overflow to us, as well, through that ramifying event! [8/16/11; 12/11/24]

The premial Atonement that we have been documenting from Scripture magnifies the graciousness of God as neither vicarious/honorial satisfaction (Anselm) nor penal satisfaction/substitution (esp. Calvin) can possibly do; they don’t come close, not by a yawning gulf! The practical, pastoral, and societal effects of the premial interpretation have yet to be fully exhibited in the modern era, but they may yet prove revolutionary, in the happiest sense of the word. May God grant it may be so, to the credit of His most welcoming and revitalizing salvation! [8/17/11; 12/10/24]

God’s wrath is not infrequently manifested through the “natural order” (as Enlightenment modernism has come to categorize it) via curses, as deprivation of blessings as well as by unvarnished evils. But these enactments of God’s will (in predictable response to human wills) can hardly be construed as automatic, i.e., mechanically naturalistic, and hence impersonal. Yet we must quickly add that such evils are by no means ipso facto signs of God’s wrath. For the wicked were also created in God’s image, so possess a measure of sovereignty and authority to wield over created things, even for wrong, contrary to God’s disposition to bless, in graciousness. Consequently, things are not always what they seem. The cross of Christ is the most glaring example, which, without the authoritative interpretation supplied by his specially instructed apostles, becomes the most bewildering enigma. It may look like the wrath of God in extremis, yet that superficial assessment could not be farther from the Truth if a congress of devils had assembled to reframe the whole event and turn it on its head to discredit God’s personal character and historic reputation of wisdom, goodness, and love! It appears that John Calvin and his epigones managed quite well enough without their infernal help. Ironically, they succeeded far, far beyond what the Devil could possibly have achieved on his own, for they propagated their doctrines in the very name of Christ and his Gospel, and not as outright blasphemers who might easily be detected as such and discredited (not to add, prosecuted?). [8/19/11; 12/10-11/24]

We can only sit back in wondering admiration at the achievements of such theologians as Edward W. Fudge and Lawrence Vance, among a select vocal minority, who have assayed to demolish so much that is erroneous in Calvinistic doctrines of salvation, with one hand tied behind their back—THE RIGHT HAND OF PREMIAL ATONEMENT! Vance has all but exhaustively upended all five classic errors of Calvinism, yet without a culminating uprooting and renunciation of the deepest and most intransigent tip of its taproot, penal substitution—failing which, all five hoary deviations will simply continue to sprout and grow back in time.

So also with Edward Fudge’s sturdy and persuasive apostolic alternative to the further outgrowth from Calvinistic soteriology, “everlasting conscious punishment.” For Fudge, not without painful irony, remained a staunch devotee of penal substitution, from which “everlasting conscious punishment” naturally stems! His formidable but mistaken debating opponent, Prof. Robert Peterson (of Covenant Theological Seminary, St. Louis, MO, from which Fudge himself had earlier graduated), has not overlooked this embarrassing inconsistency in Fudge’s position, who, for his part, too kindly attempted to parlay his own unexamined concession into a ‘peace offering’ to establish at least some friendly (if shaky) common ground where they might meet. But however kindly, it was wrongly conceded and will prove to be a ‘worm that dieth not‘ in the inconclusive—indeed, irresolvable—negotiations between Fudge’s more consistently Biblical teaching about final punishment (for there is one!) and Peterson’s (et al) Calvinistic caricature.

In brief: Fudge needs a premial atonement that comports more seamlessly with his view of the final state. Otherwise the hideous worm of penal satisfaction remains unsatisfied in its voracious appetite to devour God’s premial justice right along with its root in divine love and its fruit of divine graciousness.

However, Vance and Fudge, although two of the otherwise most thorough cleansers of the temple of historical theology from key Calvinistic errors, are by no means alone in their subversive inconsistencies. Other similarly noble modern pioneers of recent generations include Markus Barth, Clark Pinnock, Tom Smail, Chris Marshall, Colin Gunton, James Kallas, Jurgen Moltmann, Hans Urs von Balthasar, David Brondos, Douglas Campbell, Greg Boyd, Darrin Snyder Belousek, J. R. Daniel Kirk, and Mako Nagasawa. Such a worthy assemblage often stride right to the brink of the crystal clear waters of atoning truth, yet fall short of taking the plunge to get baptized tip to toe. The rest of us remain the poorer for their halting progress. May God yet grant a youthful corps of daring students, willing to follow the Lamb yet further, wherever he may lead. [8/19/11; 12/10-11/24]

The Five Sticking Points of Calvinism, and Their Common Taproot

The notorious Five Points of Calvinism all conspire to reinforce the penal substitution doctrine of the Atonement. Hence the denial and invalidation of any of them tends to the subversion of this latter doctrine as well. So it is passing strange that opposition to Calvinism as a whole does not more often manifest a similar opposition to penal substitution, as such. To be sure, the “governmental” theory of the Atonement did take up residence in the gap following the death of Arminius himself, but that was merely a compromised or mediating stance—an unsatisfactory half-way house for the Remonstrants seeking a more thorough rehabilitation of Biblical truth about the Atonement. Many American theologians, following the Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century also espoused versions of the governmental theory of Hugo Grotius (e.g., Charles Finney, many Restorationists of the Stone-Campbell movement, some Wesleyans, as well as William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, in England), but this position was still immovably based on penal “justice” entirely, not on premial, in the least. Yet without at least some conception of a just atonement (however construed) this doctrine can wander even farther afield. [7/29/11; 12/2/24]

I have no stake or interest in “exposing” the truths that the renown Calvin or Beza or Owen or Turretin or Hodge or Dabney or Warfield or Murray or Morris or Packer or their successors may have taught, but only their errors concerning salvation. For the whole truth, after all, we have the Bible at our fingertips, and for our guides, Jesus and his select apostles, who have no peers. [7/31/11]

BAD PRAYER HABITS

We Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, Reformed, Lutherans, and so forth, proud heirs of the Protestant Reformation, have not generally been taught to pray for justice for ourselves, much less for others. With variations, we have been drilled that “mercy, not justice” is all we dare expect. Under the aegis of Pietist and Puritan instructors, we have felt we were “miserable sinners,” unworthy of claiming our just due when we are wronged. May we not, then, beseech God for compensation from hurts and injuries? Since, to be sure, we are not to avenge ourselves but to forgive one another and love even our enemies, may we not ask God to restore what at least Satan has wrongfully taken—stolen!—from us? Can we not plead, “How long, O Lord, will you not avenge our souls?” Our traditional Protestant practices greatly diminish us and dim our sense of justice and our outrage at injustice. It palpably eviscerates our social witness to thus numb our self-consciousness, and hence our social conscience. The premial doctrine of the Atonement, by stark contrast, heralds AN INTEGRAL RESTORATION OF CONSCIENCE ACROSS THE BOARD! [7/30-31; 12/2/24]

The obvious, glaring, even embarrassing fact (hard fact!) that the apostles and the entire early church appear to have no problem whatever with the sense and logic of the Atonement, whereas the penal substitution theory has never won universal acclaim among Christians and has always had strenuous opponents in spite of its show of bravado and denunciations of its critics, and in further combination with the peculiar fact (hard fact) that the historic Christian movement worldwide has never established any authoritative universal (“catholic”) creedal statement on the topic of the Atonement, these observations all conspire to argue persuasively for an exceedingly simple and, dare I say, obvious solution to what has become (but most certainly was not originally) a veritable hornet’s nest of buzzing contradictions and stinging conundrums. [8/1/11]

Is it just possible that a major reason the vaunted logic of penal payment simply does not compute to many candid minds, and that there seems to be no way out (either to its proponents or, especially and poignantly, to its critics who were former adherents, some of whom, in overreaction, have thrown out the Bible along with the dirty bathwater produced in failed attempts to “clean” the dogma) is that we have culpably neglected what Scripture communicates about restorative justice, and in particular, that offenders ought to RESTORE with a surplus what they deprived their victims of, to whatever degree possible? In other words, haven’t we taken true justice altogether out of the picture and instead clumsily sketched in “punishment of the offender” in place of restitution, reparation, and restoration by the offender to the victim? For penal payment is predicated on punishing…somebody! And since no recognizable salvation can be derived from punishing sinners outright for their sins (indeed, its full measure might destroy them, ironically enough!), then obviously that “somebody” must be somebody else—a “substitute.” But such a delusive solution only ushers in cartloads of conundrums that have afflicted the theory ever since Calvin gave it its first definitive form in the 16th century, following its proto-demi-articulation in Anselm’s “vicarious satisfaction” theory more than four centuries earlier.

However, whenever we once firmly grasp that divine justice ultimately, fundamentally, requires RESTORATION, plus further over-compensation in case of criminal intent, then “the veil is removed,” and we behold God’s RESURRECTION of Jesus RESTORING to him what he lost by Satan’s chicanery at the cross! Then we can dramatically observe what “the righteousness (actually, justice) of God is all about! Then the Atonement makes perfect sense and all “mystery” evaporates under the passionate heat of God’s abiding love for our ephemeral race! [8/1/11]