Jesse, after starting to weave a tapestry of sturdy logic embedded in Scripture (mostly) within these earlier sections of The Natural Ability of Man (which bear most significantly on the Atonement):
“The Justice of God” (pp. 80-88)
“The Justice of God’s Wrath” (pp. 143-57)
“The Greatest Moral Influence in the Universe” (pp. 233-37)
“A Greater Moral Influence than the Law” (pp. 254-63)
you then steadily proceed to build up a head of steam to unravel that promising design, dropping little hints within the following two sections about what is to come:
“The Atonement as Objective and Subjective” (p. 270)
“Men Absolutely Need Jesus Christ” (p. 271).
Then in “Man’s Repentance and the Finished Work of Christ” you get a more secure handhold (on pages 438-39) before taking a tug (on page 444), a couple of yanks (on pages 445-46), and proceed to reel in most of that tightly woven yarn (on pages 448-56), with a last few decisive pulls (on pages 466-68, 470, and 475-76). Accordingly, it seems to me you manage to reverse yourself and virtually undo the “Justice of God” (pp. 80-88)! This was disheartening to observe. Love, grace, and mercy are all together slaughtered on the altar of “governmental” “public justice.” I can’t urge you emphatically enough to consider jettisoning the “wood, hay, and stubble” of a theory that can somehow justify these results.
I submit to you that “public justice” (in the Governmental/Rectoral Theory of the Atonement) is simply no substitute for PREMIAL JUSTICE.
Isaiah 53 speaks of the “reward” of the Servant’s sufferings, in order to benefit others and justify them, not the “equivalent punishment” or “penalty in exchange” for others’ sins, in order to justify them. There is no pecuniary exchange rate involved here.
The last three verses of the most famous “Servant Song,” both in the Hebrew Masoretic and the Greek Septuagint (LXX) texts, extol the reward of the Servant for all his seemingly thankless labors, thus elaborating and filling out the opening verse of the song, 52:13.
Yet nowhere in between those “bookends” do we read a story about any “equivalent suffering,” between the Servant’s afflictions and the people’s “deserved punishment” for all their sins. THERE IS NO “EXCHANGE OF PENALTY” HERE, contrary to penal substitution doctrine. But NEITHER IS THERE ANY INTIMATION OF A “SUBSTITUTE PENALTY” to effect ALLEGED “EXEMPLARY” “HONORING” OR “VINDICATING” OF THE LAW. Not a whisper! Thus this pivotal passage lends no authority to Governmental Substitution doctrine either.
Much rather, Isaiah is here telling the enigmatic story of a Servant of Jehovah wrongly dishonored and disgracefully abased beyond measure by Israel (“many”), yet who because of his irreproachable endurance of this personal assault, was subsequently exalted by God to much higher glory, plus the capability to justify others in the bargain! And did I mention extended life and light? Small detail. All told, this is not your ordinary judicial restitution. Nor does the Servant seek revenge against his clueless people “in exchange for” or “as equivalence to” their sins, which he was bearing without “reviling” or “threatening” (Isaiah 53:7,9, I Peter 2:23). In fact, “inexplicably” he asks God to pardon the Gentile soldiers nailing his limbs to the timber like a scarecrow, as we know from Gospel fulfillment.
So Isaiah is narrating a prophetic vision of a suffering Messiah whose faithful obedience to God’s desire (and, yes, it was God’s “intention” or “plan” [βουλεται, Isaiah 53:10 LXX], or, as we might render in more military terms, “strategy”) to “crush him” and “cause him to be wounded” or “cleanse him of the blow” (LXX) that he absorbed (from Satan).
It appears then that 52:13 simply announces Christ’s exaltation to extraordinary glory, whereas the rest of the song, culminating in 53:10-12, relates how he happened to get way up there, namely, by wrongful humiliation that won God’s superlative favor, yet not exclusively for Christ alone, but for others—all others, as it turns out, or it would have been insufficient, in God’s estimation and reckoning, as deserved restitution for all that undeserved abuse. Yet no thought of penal economic equivalence enters this sacred scene of suffering, nor even of government-vindicating demonstration. Rather, it all bespeaks a covenantal ratification of promises to the long-prophesied Just One of Jehovah so that by that final, once-for-all sacrifice, God would be justified to pour out all those nation-healing, world-transforming, earth-regenerating blessings of the all-too-often-broken covenant. The slain sacrifice deserved a premial outcome!
It is true that “Penal Substitution” is an erroneous theory of the Atonement, but it would not be correct to add that its adherents therefore do not believe the essentials of the Gospel. Indeed they do! For every adherent, every teacher, every preacher, every defender, even every theological formulator and champion of penal satisfaction/substitution doctrine—and by the same token every promulgator of governmental/rectoral exemplification (sometimes contestedly termed acceptilation) doctrine—firmly believes in Christ’s Resurrection from the dead (as certified by the fatal, eye-witnessed and officially conducted Crucifixion). AND THAT WAS THE ATONING ACT OF GOD (or at least stage one, on earth, later consummated at the throne in Heaven). They simply do not understand Christ’s death in this resurrectionary light.
In effect—I prefer to see the funny side of the whole colossal historic snafu—these two grand penal substitution theories teach too much that is false about Christ’s cross and too little that is true about his resurrection. Still, they hold securely and nobly to the unshakable factuality of both events. Accordingly, despite their excess baggage for the one venture and their meager equipage for the other, such believers actually do trust the atoning operation of the Father and the Son, but they don’t recognize that’s how it works. A comedy of errors, you might say. If they recognized the whole glorious, surprising truth of this really simple Gospel, would they let go their encumbering, divisive, misleading theories? I like to think so. I ardently hope that good humor can rise to the occasion and give the grace to laugh out loud (LOL) at the eyesores we have constructed to defend the palace fortress of God’s Truth.
It was Hugo Grotius who first accused Faustus Socinus of viewing God merely as an offended “individual” (Natural Ability, p. 447) rather than the Rector of the universe who “must” have an “atonement” that “sustains” and “maintains” the “honor,” “authority,” and “influence” of His law, by establishing “mental impressions” of His “regard” for His law so that human beings fear to violate or transgress it.
However, no one prior to Grotius would have found Socinus objectionable or guilty on this basis. No one had thought to divide God up in this strange (unbiblical?) manner. God ruled personally even in His use of intermediaries, but in any case has no stake in preserving human governments that rule over “the works of His [‘personal’!] hands.” “The Stone cut out without hands” shatters them all alike without compunction, in time. HIS ATONEMENT must transcend and supervene such ephemeral makeshifts, not endorse them.
Human governments such as Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon and Darius’s Persia, which cannot maintain themselves without persecuting the righteous (like Daniel and his three friends), must eventually topple like the proud image of Nebuchadnezzar’s vision. It isn’t worth its lack of salt. Why would anyone cherry pick episodes from these obsolete old divinely-doomed imperial regimes in the times of Daniel, Esther, Ezra, Zerubbabel, and Nehemiah? Did Grotius see so little of the stark contrast between them and Jesus’ Kingdom that he actually had to appeal to their clumsy decrees and outmoded pagan wisdoms in order to explain how God’s transcendingly glorious atoning wisdom “must” operate? It seems a monstrous presumption. This is certainly misreading the Bible with a “vengeance,” literally! Let’s get a life—the life of Jesus! That’s what really atones!
~to be continued~
The Premial Atonement 