The New Testament Gospel is Essentially Premial

The manifestation of the righteousness of God “apart from [works of] the Law [of Moses]” (Romans 3:21) is an allusion to the resurrection of Christ apart from the retributive judgments against his killers that the Law demanded.  In other words, this was the grandest possible demonstration of God’s life-giving blessing apart from the curse!  It is in this sense that God expressed His righteousness at the Messianic climax “apart from the Law.”  In the words of Romans 4, “the Law produces wrath,” yet the resurrectionary verdict of God gushed forth graciousness, superabundant (according to the demands of divine justice, for Heaven’s sake!!!) and absolutely free to every believer!  [2/18/09]

It is quite true that, as J. Denny Weaver observes, God’s invitation “to join the struggle of those seeking liberation from the forces that bind and oppress” “envisions both those who are oppressed and their oppressors.”  (“Narrative Christus Victor:  The answer to Anselmian Atonement Violence,” in Atonement and Violence:  A Theological Conversation, edited by John Sanders [Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 2006], p. 23.)  However, we only know it’s true because of the historic fact that neither the Cross nor the Resurrection entailed any wrath or avenging from God Himself against any human party whatever, much less against His own dear Son…not even “for our sake” as some offbeat “substitute.”  [2/20/09]

If to know a created thing is to know what to expect of it, and if to know a person is to know what to expect of them in varied circumstances, and if to know God is to know what to expect of Him in diverse situations, then the “penal substitutionary”  doctrine about the Atonement that leads us to know God as someone who demands that debts be paid before He can forgive them has hereby radically twisted the true knowledge of the astoundingly gracious God of the Bible into a miserable, miserly caricature (objections that this representation is itself a facile caricature of its teaching, to the contrary, notwithstanding–see my “‘Penal Satisfaction/Substitution’ in English Hymns”: https://premialatonement.wordpress.com/penal-satisfaction-substitution-in-english-hymns/).  [2/22/09; 11/06/16]

On his mother’s side of the family, Jesus of Nazareth was merely human, though Davidic royalty (and likewise, de jure, on Joseph’s side…his “step father”).  So when he—David’s Seed—was falsely condemned to a viciously unjust death, the royal house of David might have been justified in avenging it in the usual manner.

But on his Father’s side of the family, on the other hand.…  [2/22/09]

With the announcement of this clarification of the age old Gospel as essentially premial, God is saying, “All is forgiven, come and dine.”  Without rancor, let us all make the necessary adjustments with no finger-pointing, and let’s get on with the urgent task of wholehearted, conscientious proclamation to the whole world, the entire creation, every family, tongue, land, and nation, until Christ returns to judge.  Let us join arms and on with the task!  [2/24/09]

At the Cross, God allowed evil.  This is a revealing cross-section of the entirety of human history.  The hill of Calvary is the “apex” (read:  nadir!) and culmination of human wickedness precisely because Jesus, by diametric contrast, was the crown of human righteousness.  Yet in its very being this, those crosshairs on Golgotha targeted the precise locus of God’s own longsuffering, patience, kindness, and mercy, which had ever been in operation at every moment of sin’s seeming ascendancy.

However, the story didn’t end there.  In virtually immediate response to this summum malum of evil came the RESURRECTION that supremely culminated the manifestation of God’s unexpected resources of righteousness and, accordingly, graciousness!  So, yes, here is the “theodicy” the world needs and has been waiting desperately for.  Yet there it was all the time!  There God proved that He can turn evil to a good use…in a worst case scenario.  That’s the essence of the premial Gospel.

Are there any questions?  [2/25/09]

The supreme FUSION REACTION of CLEAN ENERGY

The cursing of Jesus by hanging him on a “tree” (xulon) was THE LAST STRAW—THE UNDOING OF THE LAW. THE SINLESSNESS OF THE SON AND RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE FATHER SUNK THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE LAW. God honored that curse with as heavy a heart as Jephthah the Gileadite when he fulfilled his vow to Jehovah and offered up his daughter—“His one and only child; apart from her he had no son or daughter” (Judges 11:34)—“and I cannot retract” (Judges 11:29-35-40). [7/19/07]

Contrary to J. Denny Weaver, we hold that the Atonement had to be violent, otherwise there could be no atoning virtue sent from God. For God’s righteousness is precisely His restoring or “atoning” response to the mishandling of Jesus, the Savior. His Spirit of promise is the very substance of His cleansing virtue—the superabundant (because truly just) award (dikaioma) in exchange for Christ’s virtuously voluntary experience of abuse on our behalf. Without violence, without the Cross, without the blood, there could be no liberation from sin and all its evil consequences. Nevertheless, this is not “divine” violence (by any stretch!) for God’s role was to reverse it so that we could get His own cleansing, healing, refreshing, vivifying Spirit to keep up our expectations through every bitter trial and test of trust, exactly as it did for Jesus. Thus violence (evil) had to come prior to its solution or what’s a solution for?! [7/19/07]

The re-uniting of Jesus, the Son, with God, his Father, after his ascension, effected a “FUSION REACTION” that RELEASED STUPENDOUS CLEAN ENERGY of WHOLESOME SPIRIT according to the net gain determined by a COSMIC FORMULA OF OVERCOMPENSATION comparable only with Einstein’s discovery in physics of e=mc². The cross of Jesus the Messiah was planted and plugged into the bedrock of a primal law sustaining the very created universe. His sacrificial self-surrender into the murderous hands of his envious enemies on orders from his Father, voluntarily complied with, when completed in a radically unjust death, DETONATED LIFE to a degree inconceivable, beggaring human calculation. The first wave of the blast engulfed Jesus himself, catapulting him to instant immortality. But after he passed through the heavens and entered the presence of the “Wholesome of Wholesomes” (the holiest of all)—none other than the glory of his Father on his throne of graciousness, the “mercy seat”—a further voluminous wave exploded in answer to this implosion of the humanly embodied Explanation and Image back into the bosom home of his Origin and Progenitor. And that shock wave hit this planet ten days later in a baptism of pure energy that electrified all his believers into the expression of new motivated gifts that channeled and conveyed the resulting Life and Light to yet others in a chain reaction that has not stopped to this day. [7/25/07]