It is our responsibility to be conciliated to God because it is we who became alienated from Him! (Se Paul Peter Waldenström’s illustration from marriage, drawn from 1 Corinthians 7:11—p. 106 in The Reconciliation.) God has demonstrated and displayed His absence of enmity by letting His beloved Son be murdered without immediate reprisal, but instead declared clemency and pardon and extended superabounding graciousness—giving His very own Holy Spirit to all who believe the Proclamation! [12/08/07]
The well-known tension between God’s “justice” and His “love” has its source primarily in the misunderstanding of His “justice” as “penal” exclusively. Such a “justice” demands a counterweight to balance out the divine attributes. But this tension turns out to be pernicious ad subversive of the unity and consistency of God’s character and activities.
Much rather, God’s justice is both restorative toward the righteous and punitive toward the vicious. The justice/righteousness of God’s character controls and conditions all else that He is and does; it is the normativity that determines the harmony of all His characteristics.
Hence, to have grasped (what is sufficiently illustrated all over the pages of the Hebrew Scriptures) that God’s justice is predominantly restorative would be to have pre-empted the impulse to “balance” it with “love” since to restore the losses of the righteous is itself an expression of love and needs no supplementation. Yet this profound truth cannot become properly clear until and unless the resurrection of Christ is grasped as the supreme manifestation of God’s justice historically. This simply has not been seen because of the veil of darkness thrown around the topic by the “penal substitution” dogma of Western orthodoxies. For there the Resurrection is a mere afterthought—a drone doctrine! Thereby the Resurrection has been rendered inert and feckless. [12/12/07]
Anders Nygren’s insistence that although the Hebrew scriptures attribute justice to God, the Christian scriptures do not (acc. Nicholas Wolterstorff in “Justice of God,” in For Faith and Clarity: Philosophical Contributions to Christian Theology, pp. 180-81, ed. By James K. Beilby [Baker, 2006]) is obviously premised on the Lutheran (and Reformed) blindspots concerning Paul’s use of “the righteousness of God” as meaning “the justice of God” because of the Reformation’s substitute of “the righteousness of Christ” where God’s own justice belongs. [12/12/07]
The belief that there is “no alternative” but to believe in penal substitution in order to be faithful to the “cross” is a STRONG DELUSION. Now why do you suppose Satan would be so ardent to represent the situation in these colors, hmm? [12/12/07]
The Premial Atonement 