Of my dear Anabaptist brethren I must ask, if the Atonement—if the Cross, for Heaven’s sake!—wasn’t violent, then how on earth is a loving compassionate, pitying, non-retaliating God ever going to find another such golden opportunity to roll up His sleeves and demonstrate how in the world He can rectify EVILS and save us from such abysmal, heartless violence? Huh? Huh? Huh? Answer me that, if you can. We too must “embrace the darkness,” as Jesus did, and watch what God will do! [6/07/08]
The above statement from eight years ago deserves further nuancing and tweaking in retrospect. The Girardian thesis has affected traditional positions of some Anabaptists. There also are significant differences among pacifist, non-violent, and non-retaliatory positions, both inside and outside the stream of the “Radical Reformation.” But in this blog site I wish to highlight their varied bearing on Atonement teaching in particular. I presume no one can view the Cross of Christ without seeing violence. The big question is God’s complicity, if any, in that act. Alleged answers remain scattered all over the map in varying degrees of mutual contradiction and antagonism. Barring the elaboration of a serviceable cartography of the theological territory, I here simply and urgently press for fair and sober consideration of the premial alternative espoused throughout this site. I surely need not add another iteration of that exposition at this point. The above paragraph only ventures a little dig at those few Anabaptist brothers and sisters who may deny violence per se to the Cross of Christ, not to those who (like myself) deny that God was there showing violence to His Son…at least not by His own hand…at least not wrathful violence…at least not penal violence…. And the dicing goes on. Come, let us reason together. [6/06/16]
Jesus was not being assailed by “holy and righteous divine wrath because of human sin,” but by corrupt and sinful human fury because of Satanic vengeance. This explains why God necessarily manifested the magnificent display of His righteousness, on account of Messiah’s faithfulness (without which it would have been historically impossible) in raising him from the dead and, even more, sending Their Spirit of wholesomeness to make us alive and wholesome too! All this by way of super-compensating justice! [6/07/08]
God was evidently in no hurry to show His hatred of sin in penal justice toward the murderers of His precious Only-born. Instead, He was single-minded to give an unforgettable exhibit of His amending justice toward His dear mangled Offspring. What merely human father wouldn’t have shown the very same PRIORITIES, FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE?! Where’s our head? Indeed, where’s our “heart,” that we get all distracted by some impersonally abstract caricature of paternal concern? Evangelical, orthodox, traditional, conservative theology is emotionally dysfunctional and given to mouthing heartless, emotionless, cold, hard…fictions! Offering venomous scorpions instead of embryonic Gospel truths! Oppressively burdensome rocks instead of mouthwatering loaves of heaven-fresh manna! [6/07/08]
You want something “objective” to make salvation “more solid”? “I’ll give you something ‘objecive’,” God answers: THE HOLY SPIRIT! This is the way the apostles Peter and Paul argue. The empirical, extraordinary phenomena that always accompanied the immersion in the Holy Spirit were appealed to as PROOF POSITIVE of God’s OBJECTIVE ACCEPTANCE OF NON-CIRCUMCISED GENTILES, pejoratively labeled with the slur, “the foreskins”! Similar racial slurs—such as “redskins,” “darkies,” etc., in American history—are only overcome, much less extinguished, with enormous difficulty. It’s little surprise, then, that God should provide a similarly external sign to neutralize the prejudicial reflexes that such marks trigger by long usage and mental imprinting from infancy.
The idea that something more “objective” was inflicted by the cross of Christ beyond its indelible, historic, eye-witnessed snuffing out the life of God’s veritable Son, our Savior, is a groundless, non-verifiable assertion of theologians with penal obsessions/ compulsions. We need to get over this. Theologians need therapy (therapeuo, “to heal”) too. [6/07/08; 9/11/08]
The Premial Atonement 