The potent drawing power of the apostolic Gospel that moves sinners to get conciliated with God resides in the humanly astonishing message that God gave His own beloved Son into the hands of the very sinners He wanted to save. When they publicly assassinated him instead of accepting him as their divinely chosen Messiah, rather than destroying them for their vicious crime God simply (!) reversed their sinless victim’s death and HELD THEM HARMLESS IF THEY CONFESSED THEIR SIN! Such a Proclamation possesses inherent conciliatory punch to spur sinners to change their minds and return to such a God.
By stark contrast with this premial justice of God manifested at Christ’s resurrection, John Calvin’s doctrine concerning God’s penal justice at the cross has no such evident heart-transforming power, consequently he was constrained to make up for this energy deficiency by inventing a prior regeneration by the Holy Spirit acting only upon the ‘unconditionally elect’ with an ‘irresistible grace‘ on account of their ‘total depravity’ that disenables them from believing his ‘gospel’ — thus placing the blame for his own deficient ‘gospel’ on each sinner’s supposed ‘fallen’ condition!
This disembowling of the Apostolic Gospel into an effete substitute goes far to explain why any appeal to the power of the Message itself (such as Abelard had championed, though arguably on an insufficient basis) falls on deaf ears when presented to hardened Calvinists. Yet how might the authentic premial Gospel itself fare?!
Still, we must concur with Calvin that the penal satisfaction/substitution message does, to be sure, lack full power to conciliate sinners to such a deity who must show his wrath before forgiveness can be forthcoming. It lacks ethical force; it lacks a prima facie exhibit of appealing love. It must be hedged by a cartload of qualifiers to pose it as rational and moral. It is fraught with contradictions. It makes a pretty embarrassing showing, needing to be propped up by an assemblage of crutches and feeble apologetics. [9/22/11]
Penal substitutionary leaders of the Jews — the high priesthood in particular — were so totally clueless in their hardheartedness and forensic blindness that they reasoned that unless they eliminated the ‘threat’ of Jesus and his messiahood, the Romans would come and “take away our place as well as out nation“ (John 11:47-48) not comprehending that getting rid of him is exactly what would culminate their national turpitude and precipitate the destruction of their cherished temple, the city of Jerusalem, and indeed their prized national existence. Ah, the best laid plans of mice and priests! [9/26/11]
Penal substitution advocates tend to hold that justice in Scripture is mainly, if not exclusively, to be construed as penal, although justification yet somehow tests ‘positive‘ (i.e., premial!) when we get around to Paul’s epistles (however, only in a roundabout manner via a penal substitute). Yet the lexical facts stack up differently: in both the Old and New Testaments, justice is two-sided, i.e., either penal or premial, depending what the deserts of the defendant in question call for — penal toward the vicious and premial toward the upright, in accord with the two-fold sanctions of the ancient Sinai Covenant. Even so, justice often appears prominently premial in the O.T., without explanation or apology.
Moreover, in virtually all Greek literature outside the New Testament “justification” (dikaioo) is penal, never premial.* Only in Paul’s writings do we find an outright premial interpretation of “justify” — in particular, God’s “justification.” He could not have derived this definition from Greek (much less, Roman) literature or judicial customs or terminological usages. But if from the Old Testament (i.e., the LXX), where the concept of justice is likewise weighted to the premial, why would “justify” ever need to entail a penal twist?! [9/26/11]
*See Mark A. Seifrid, Paul’s Use of Righteousness Language Against Its Hellenistic Background,” in Justification and Variegated Nomism, Vol 2 (2004) 39-74.
The Premial Atonement 