Suffering Moses’ CURSE does not equate with suffering God’s WRATH

Of course Christ suffered a curse; he was commissioned to overcome all evils that had come against us!  THE CURSE HAD MET ITS MATCH…AND LOST!  Hallelujah!

However, suffering a curse is a very different matter from suffering God’s wrath, and Scripture clearly makes a distinction between them, especially when it comes to the Just One, the Servant of the Lord, who came to bear the sin, disease, and curse, yet was most emphatically in God’s favor at all times.  [6/18/10]

Where does Scripture ever teach that God “was propitiated” by the suffering of His Son at the cross?  It is nowhere to be found. [6/28/10]

William Rees [Welsh: Gwilym Hiraethog] (1802-1883), in his widely loved and justly renown hymn, “Here Is Love, Vast As the Ocean” (English translation by William Edwards [1848-1929]) is completely consonant with premial justice. This most famous hymn of the Welsh Revival (1904-1905) says it right, and with no whiff of divine wrath or shadow of condemnation at the cross.

1. Here is love, vast as the ocean,
Loving-kindness as the flood,
When the Prince of Life, our Ransom,
Shed for us His precious blood.
Who His love will not remember?
Who can cease to sing His praise?
He can never be forgotten,
Throughout heav’n’s eternal days.

2. On the mount of crucifixion,
Fountains opened deep and wide;
Through the floodgates of God’s mercy
Flowed a vast and gracious tide.
Grace and love, like mighty rivers,
Poured incessant from above,
And heav’n’s peace and perfect justice
Kissed a guilty world in love.

[6/28/10]

JESUS BORE NEITHER GUILT NOR PENALTY BUT RATHER INJURY

Jesus never bore either the guilt or the penalty of sin(s) but only the injury.  [6/30/10]

Why should SALVATION FROM God’s wrath “demand” a DISPLAY OF God’s wrath in order to atone for sin?

Why should human salvation from God’s wrath somehow “demand” a display of God’s wrath?  Is God’s marvelous graciousness, then, only a by-product of His frightful wrathfulness?  How has such a counter-intuitive (not to add, perversely twisted) logic ever gained the favor and renown of orthodox theologians in Western traditions?  [5/28/10]  Here, the true Gospel is not the mystery at all; its bizarre surrogate is!  [8/21/11]

Penal satisfaction is compelled to insist irrationally and outrageously that God’s alleged “wrath at the cross” manifests His “love.”

If, as penal satisfaction advocates maintain, God’s wrath was the active ingredient in the atonement, then they are absolutely forced to assert that such a display at the cross was a manifestation of “love,” regardless of the obvious thrust of Scripture and normal human sensibilities.  This rationalization inevitably and pervasively twists proper definitions and perceptions, justifying atrocities that are by no means justifiable.  Do we get the tragic ethical payoff of such an atonement theory?  A revelation of God’s wrath from heaven only shows love for us if it falls on our threatening enemies!  Not if we get harmed by it!  (Discipline is a different matter entirely.)

Such twisted conclusions are what comes of ignoring the concordant usage of Biblical vocabulary in theology.  Other terms get contorted and distorted in order to adjust to “what’s s’posed to be,” regardless of gross cognitive dissonance.  This also means that many a theologian exerts might and main to distinguish God’s “basic attitude” from his “external” or “phenomenal” or “governmental” manifestations of wrath, etc.  All unnecessary!

WILLIAM LAW’S RATIONALIZATIONS ABOUT GOD’S WRATH AND GOD’S “NATURE”

The same goes for William Law’s recoiling from the thought that “wrath” was a part of God’s “nature”–a reflex that betrays more discomfort with the rationalizations of Calvin’s penal satisfaction than it conveys honesty with straightforward Biblical language.  Calvin’s whole system in fact collapses in principle when he alleges that God’s wrath necessarily fell on His Son; so not surprisingly, he himself immediately starts to waffle, for even Calvin can see that Christ’s innocence shatters the very possibility of a righteous God actually expressing real wrath against him.  [5/14/10]

BAPTISM DENOTES OUR IDENTIFYING WITH CHRIST’S UNDESERVED DEATH AND WELL-DESERVED RESURRECTION

To get immersed into Christ by baptism is to experience the graciousness of the Holy Spirit that he received from God by his resurrection in marvelously super-compensating response to his enduring the gross injustices leading to his crucifixion for our sakes and because of our sins against him. Therefore baptism equates to our “identifying” with his undeserved death rather than to his “identifying” with our deserved death. [5/04/10]

Douglas Campbell’s invention of “the Teacher” as Paul’s interlocutor in his Roman epistle is radically misconceived.

Douglas A. Campbell* argues for a Pauline gospel that makes God’s love, grace, and beneficence primary and basic to His  being.  I have little objection to such an emphasis except that his route thereto wrongly muffles God’s wrath/ anger/ indignation toward sin and its evil fruits.  Consequently, along the way, Campbell discounts the raw force of many a Scripture that exhibits His unvarnished ire.  Had he perceived “the righteousness of God” as always  resurrectionary in relation to His Son, and had he therefore been able to incorporate key passages such as Romans 3:25-26 into Paul’s authentic gospel rather than conceding them to “the Teacher” he alleges Paul to be contending with, he might have perceived how to retain the basic thrust of God’s love and benevolence without jettisoning His veritable indignation against subbornness and hardheartedness.  As it stands, Campbell’s obliviousness to the meaning of sacrificial blood as “resurrection from the dead” by the power of the Holy Spirit has sabotaged the main strength of his theological advance toward full recovery of the Pauline teaching about justification and atonement.

Moreover, had he seen this, Campbell could have distinguished more carefully between the “Christ event(s)” of crucifixion and resurrection as regards which of those in particular actually “reveals,” “manifests,” and “displays” the righteousness of God proper.  Yet, against his own best interests, and contrarty to the integral coherence of the Gospel, he left the door open for some sort of “righteousness of God” attaching to the crucifixion (and not even simply to Christ’s personal faithfulness and obedience in submitting to the gross indignity of that paramount exhibit of human sinfulness, which, though plausible and inoffensive on its surface, still happens to be askew from Paul’s consistent, driving intention in all his discourse regarding God’s own justice relative to human justification).  By a process of elimination, such an attachment necessarily reduces down to a penal “righteousness,” and accordingly marches Campbell right back into the jaws of the conundrum that compels him to spin out a theory of “the Teacher,” along with his fateful “baby-plus-bathwater-throw-away program” when confronted with certain challenging scriptures.  [5/13/10; 5/14/21; 5/17/21]

*Douglas A. Campbell, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (Grand Rapids, MI, Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2009).

The GRAVE Significance of the RESURRECTION

Let us never forget that the scoffing Jesus experienced targeted his claim to always do God’s desire, to be God’s Son, to be the source of life, to come to save, to offer the Kingdom of God.  His scoffers taunted and reproached him in challenge of those claims.  Since obviously his “Father” (snicker, snicker) was allowing this debacle of all his high and mighty rhetoric, they felt perfectly justified in poking fun at such “presumption” and making jabs at his “boasts.”  IN ESSENCE, THEY IMPUTED SIN TO JESUS AND INFERRED WRATH UPON HIM.  YET IF THEY WERE CORRECT, AS THE ORTHODOX WESTERN TRADITION CONCERNING THE ATONEMENT WOULD INSIST THEY ARE, THEN HIS RESURRECTION WAS ONLY A PATHETIC GESTURE TO WARD OFF OUR FRIGHT, EVEN TERROR, AT SUCH A SHOCKING DISPLAY OF “DIVINE” WRATH TOWARD THE COMPLETELY INNOCENT ONE AT SUCH A DISMAL UNVEILING OF GOD’S DEEPEST ABUSIVENESS.  SUCH A “RESURECTION” IS AN ANTICLIMAX THAT CAN HARDLY RECOVER US FROM OUR DIZZINESS AND REELING FROM HIS COSMIC BLOWS ON THE INNOCENT.  THIS TEACHES THE INDELIBLE LESSON (and, indeed, one learned all too well within Western Christian history) THAT “ABUSE OF THE INNOCENT PAYS OFF”!

Hideous?  Of course!  But if the only alternative is to see Jesus as a Joseph or a Job or a Jeremiah, then our grim choice is “obvious,” for otherwise where would “wrath” fit into our tidy penal theology?  But can we possibly settle for—can we conscientiously advocate for—a divine character flaw of such magnitude?  For we can be assured its lesson will not be lost on sinners, who “drink viciousness like water.”  Or must we rather rethink and where necessary repent of our orthodoxy?  For this crucial amendment will surely pay dividends in spades.  [7/15/07]

FALSE IMPUTATIONS

In contradiction of actual Scriptural usage, Protestant theological traditions have been imputing definitions that are patently unverifiable (even in cases where the terms as such are found aplenty in the Bible, while other terms or expressions are in fact never found between its covers at all) to such pivotal words and themes as “sovereignty of God,” God’s will, law, decrees, “the fall,” sin, “original sin,” “total depravity,” “merit,” righteousness, justice, justification, propitiation, forgiveness, grace, mercy, reconciliation, peace, holiness, sanctification, perfection, love, faith, hope, good works, works of law, guilt, debt, price, pay, ransom, sacrifice, cross, curse, wrath, vengeance, “substitution,” “spiritual death,” “eternal death,” blood, life, predestination, election, reprobation, regeneration, born again, adoption, glory, heaven, hell, “eternity,” AND, OF COURSE, IMPUTATION ITSELF.  [7/15/07; 6/13/15]

“Overcompensation,” in its original modal economic sense, is, to be sure, non-normative, i.e., uneconomical.  But in its juridical usage it bespeaks the norm of justice admirably.  For in retribution for injury, true justice requires overpayment from the offender to the offended party.  This is the “cost” (an economic retrocipation within the jural modal aspect) of correction.  (See Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, 4 vols. [Philadelphia:  Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1953, 1955, 1957, 1958], esp. vol. 2, pp. 129 ff.)  [7/17/07]

GRACE upon GRACE

FAVOR for FAVOR

FLUID (Holy Spirit) in exchange for FLUID (Jesus’ blood)

This marvelous exchange, visible with intense illumination in the “Crossurrection,” or exaltation of the Son to the Father, reveals the righteousness of God as “demanding” superabundant compensation.  A LITTLE SINLESS BLOOD GOES A LONG, LONG WAY.  [7/17/07]

77 Questions about the Atonement (Q&A #22)

 22.     Doesn’t God manifest His wrath from heaven against sin?

Absolutely.  God’s wrath smolders against all stiff-necked, hard-hearted, callused, stubborn wrongdoers.  And especially now that the light of Christ has appeared, refusal to believe the truth of His Proclamation of divine graciousness as demonstrated in the invaluable self-sacrifice of His innocent Son makes conscious rejection the more culpable.  Yet God’s dominant love and graciousness wait patiently with many tokens of kindness and mercy to induce people to change their minds and respond favorably to His graciousness so that He doesn’t have to destroy them after all, along with the sins they foolishly cherish.  Accordingly, when after much patience due change of heart was not more generally forthcoming, at length God unveiled His indignation against the worst sin His chosen people Israel ever committed—the virtual lynching of His own precious Son, the only qualified Messiah—by the terrifying desolation of Jerusalem and the razing of its boasted temple to the ground before that wayward generation could all die off by natural deaths.  Thus they forfeited the ultimate ‘Promised Land’ the prophets foretold.

Jesus came to make the Father’s heart visible and convey it to us in Spirit

In spite of our sins, God loves us, His children who trust Him.  In fact, God wants us more than He wants revenge.  God has no stake in extracting the last pound of flesh.  He craves conciliation with His sinful creatures, not vengeance.  He wants us to love and mature, not die before we can possibly reach maturity.  Therefore, He forgives and shows boundless favor to those who trust Him to actually be such a God!  Jesus in no way “bought” or “paid for” this favor from his Father.  Rather he came forth from the Father and thence to earth to perfectly express—to image—his Father’s favor.  In this, he was being like his Father.  (Suggested by a sermon of Jean LeMahieu.)  [10/12/97]

When Jesus the Messiah came the first time, it was to clean house—the house of Israel, the house of David.  He cleaned out diseases; he cleaned out demons; he cleared out money-changers; he cleaned out sins; he even cleaned out death on more than one occasion!  However, he wasn’t assigned the job of doing it completely or single-handedly.  He was promised and given progeny, descendants, who, along with himself and according to his pattern and power, are likewise to manifest the cleansing effects of God’s Kingdom on the earth and, after the defeat or cleaning off the earth from all his enemies, are to inherit that Kingdom in a New Earth together with him—a place for uprightness to dwell unmolested.  [10/18/97]

Jesus’ illustration commonly titled “The Prodigal Son” is evidently mislabeled.  The greater prodigality by far is that exhibited by his father.  In fact, it is precisely his father’s prodigality that causes his brother to get offended at the end!  He was not only prodigal in giving the younger son his part of the inheritance before he himself had died–how smart was that?—but when the son returned, he gave him the fatted calf to roast for a party; he gave him the first robe; he gave him a ring for his finger…which gave him access to the other half of the estate!  Now who was the more profligate, the son or the father?  Like father, like son.  The father is obviously the star prodigal, the chief spendthrift of the family.  These details should clue us in about our Father in heaven.  As in the illustration of the vineyard owner and workers, God comes off fabulously generous.  Beyond that, Jesus informs us that we should be like his Father, who is even generous to the vicious, not only the good.  That’s some ethic!  That’s some God!  [10/22/97]

It is staggering to consider the thought that the conciliating gift that God offered in Jesus the Messiah, was Himself, His very contents (pleroma), His very motivation (pneuma) of wholesomeness, life, power, peace, favor!  In other words, God conciliates us, God pacifies us by giving us gratuitously, in His Son, His own nature!  This is the reality symbolized in the Lord’s Supper.  God “bribes” us back to Himself with Himself!  That’s overwhelming!  The body and blood of the Messiah himself, with all of his Father’s life and Spirit therein represented, are given to us—“paid” to us!—into our very souls, our existences, our own flesh and blood.  [11/04/97].  Now assimilate that!