Gustaf Aulén’s Christus Victor, with Premial Highlighting

When God Himself ransoms us from “our foes,” “the oppressor,” “the enemy,” “the house of slavery,” “the hand of Sheol,” etc., He does so by expending/spending His own boundless capital from on high to invest in the cause. Accordingly, and ultimately, He sent His Son as our ransom. By his lifelong faithful obedience to the Father, especially to the bitter extremity of a wrongful and tortured public execution, HE PROMPTED GOD’S MIGHTY ACT OF JUSTICE THAT BROUGHT HIM BACK TO LIFE WITH A VAST SURPLUS OF GLORY, HONOR, AUTHORITY, RICHES, etc., in order to purchase us, too! All without cost to us (though not without obligation…). [9/14/11; 12/25/24]

The real test of candor for those who tout their advocacy and respect, even ardor, for the magnitude and magnanimity of God’s “grace“ is whether they warm up to God’s justice, with reference to salvation (in contrast to condemnation) as premial and characterized by graciousness (in contrast to indignation/wrath). Naturally, such a justice could not be construed as “substitutionary” in that case, because its whole rationale is one of rightful award/reward directly to Christ as the supreme endorsement of his own worthiness and just deserts. Similarly, such a justice could certainly not be framed as “punishment” for the sins of others vicariously, either. Thus Anselm and Calvin are both turned on their heads and emptied of the loose change that their arguably rogue theories have pocketed through the grim centuries since their opinions gained imposing strength and began exacting a terrible cost from “Christendom.”

Will, indeed, can, Calvinists even repent of their severely crabbed notions of God’s grace and come to recognize the genuine article when it stares them in the face? Can they ever come to apprehend a graciousness not abstemiously doled out only to “just so many” “paid-for” “elect,” procured in a wooden economic exchange of “so much gain for so much pain” endured by Christ, and instead grasp a graciousness showered on him in a nuclear display of trans-economizing generosity and goodwill? “Penal substitution,” in contrast, seems “terrestrial, soulish, demoniacal” (James 3:15), itself a carnal substitute for the Real McCoy. Any talk of “sovereign” grace that does not rise above the clumsy tutelage of mere mercenary exchange has seriously telescoped, not to say radically compromised, the sheer volume of God’s graciousness and must therefore reflexively limit the Atonement and continue to spawn all the irresolvable conundrums for which Calvinistic soteriology is correctly known and rightly abjured. [9/14/11; 12/24-25/24]

DEIFICATION, OR AFFILIATION?

We should speak not of “deification,” as Athanasius did, but rather of “affiliation” to/with Deity, i.e., of “adoption,” “sonship,” or “sonhood,” because the gracious Gift (including the derivative “gifts” or “presents”) of the Holy Spirit transforms/metamorphizes us into the image and likeness of the Son of God, who, unlike us, was begotten before the ages, the One in whom those ages, verily, were deftly crafted—Eph. 3:11). [9/15/11; 12/18, 24/24]

Up to (and through!) the very end of his life on earth, Jesus not only did not sin, but additionally he did not even exercise his proper Messianic rights to protect himself from injury or, at the last, from the fate of a cursed death itself. For the total desire of God included more than mere sinlessness (understood as non-violation of God’s prohibitions against specific wrongdoing—to be sure, itself a reduction of the latter’s full scope), it additionally encompasses faithful obedience to the full meaning and scope of love, against all odds and surmounting all obstacles. Christ rose to every challenge and proved utterly equal, indeed, far more than equal, to them. [9/15/11; 12/18/24]

There can be little doubt that the Lord Jesus Christ felt what it was like to be punished by God inasmuch as the hordes of Satan are not seldom God’s instruments to carry out divine judgments upon an incorrigibly wicked population (see, e.g., Gustaf Aulen, Christus Victor). Thus he can sympathize with those he came to save, having experienced a taste of the sort of punishment the unrepentant well deserve. Yet he emphatically did not deserve any divine punishment. NOR (and this is the point) DID GOD SERVE HIM WITH ANY! Therefore, there could not have been any “penal substitution” or “vicarious satisfaction” in the event of his crucifixion, for this was wholly and exclusively a CRIMINAL PERPETRATION! Yet precisely because the Son submitted to this outrage voluntarily and left the result to his Father’s just judgment, the Father quickly intervened and judged him to be just via resurrection from the dead. Thus Jesus was rewarded by God’s justice directly, not punished by God’s justice indirectly, i.e., “substitionally,” “vicariously,” “in our stead/place,” although, to be sure, it was emphatically FOR OUR SAKES!

To be perfectly clear, the Lord’s “solidarity” with sinners DID NOT ENTAIL HIS HAVING TO SUFFER GOD’S WRATH IN THE LEAST, BUT EXCLUSIVELY THE CUP OF SATANIC AFFLICTION AND HUMAN ABUSE. Now, granted, to an undiscerning observer these alternatives might have looked virtually identical, but according to divine revelation there is a vast difference, not in how it objectively felt to Jesus (for this experience was custom-designed by his loving Father to draw out his sympathy with the exact feelings of his mortal siblings, who were fellow human beings in absolute need of a salvation otherwise inaccessible), but rather in relation to God’s inner disposition toward him—one of inalienable GRACIOUSNESS.

Moreover, after God’s premial justice was executed on Christ’s behalf to repay him for this absolute surrender, that same divine graciousness unaccountably proceeds to gush willy-nilly towards us (!), baptizing all who accept it—a vivifying tsunami, wave after wave in happy succession till the end of the age! [9/15/11; 12/24-25/24]

What made the forthcoming abuse-taking of the Cross so anguishing to Christ that “his sweat became as if clots of blood descending on the earth” (Luke 22:44)? Might the reason be that the last and greatest temptation of Jesus entailed the ever-actual option of using his rightful Messianic authority to deploy “more than twelve legions of angels” (Matt. 26:53) “to destroy the world and set him free,” as the famous anthem expresses it? Such a temptation would have been horribly “enhanced” by the ready availability of this rightful, though gruesome, alternative. No other human being had ever been confronted with such a momentous choice, fraught with such cosmic repercussions. This was his only escape route, ever ready at hand. The option which he did historically choose brings home the irrepressible extravagance of his love for us. [9/15/11; 12/25/24]

Only on the basis of the premial idea of the Atonement can its fundamental character be defined as both “an uninterrupted action of God” and “an uninterrupted order of justice“ (à la Gustaf Aulén, in Christus Victor [1930] and The Faith of the Christian Church [Phila.: Fortress, 1960] pp. 210-11). For in this instance love (“the divine action”) and justice fit hand in glove. God’s rewarding, reparative, or restorative justice is extended to Christ because of God’s unintermittent love toward His dearly beloved and now treacherously, unjustly, yet officially and fatally, assaulted Son, who therefore eminently deserves that quality and magnitude of justice rendered to him by way of repayment.

Accordingly, premial atonement surpasses both the “classical” and “scholastic” ideas without difficulty or distortion, but further, it more than fulfils the “idealistic” idea, as well.

The premial idea of the Atonement transcends effortlessly the problematics of “what Christ does ‘as God’ and what he does ‘as man'” (pp. 211-12), since he renders nothing (nor “needs” to “pay”) to God anything but obedience to His will and love unblemished, uncompromised, and integral, from the heart of his unique soul as Mediator between God and “man.” This integral achievement of the Lord’s, in light of the restored apostolic teaching about God’s premial justice, greatly simplifies christology. Christ’s nature is not subdivided, much less in tension within him. Nor are God’s “righteousness and mercy” in mortal struggle to “kiss” appropriately. None of that. “Man’s” sin against God does not get “paid off” in Christ’s “human nature” or by any other celestial bookkeeping or mundane mechanics. Yet neither is God’s opposition to sin compromised as in the liberal or “idealistic” idea of the Atonement, for God’s love is not perpetuated at the cost of compromising His penal justice against sin, SINCE SIN IS NOT (AND CANNOT INTRINSICALLY BE) TAKEN AWAY BY PENAL JUSTICE IN ANY CASE (the liberals saw this!), BUT ONLY BY PREMIAL JUSTICE (the apostles saw this!). And since premial justice is perfectly in line with God’s love for the wrongfully injured and abused, MORALITY IS UPHELD RIGHT ALONG WITH LEGALITY (oh that Evangelicals saw this!). Thus, and thus alone, is a “pure” and “unified” concept of God maintained that potentially could “satisfy” Evangelicals, Liberals, and Aulén alike! After all, it seemed perfectly satisfactory to Christ’s masterfully instructed apostles! [9/15/11; 12/24-25/24]

THANKSGIVING SERIES ON THE ATONEMENT BEGINS TODAY!

I hope you have enjoyed a bountiful Thanksgiving Day, full of grateful reflections on God’s great goodness and benignity toward us in spite of whatever the Enemy can throw at us!  October 5th was the date of my previous blog, and in the meantime I have started a second blog site dealing more with the outflow and implications of a premial understanding of God’s justice—a justice He calls us to reflect across the full horizon of our lives during this vicious age of the world (Gal. 1:4).

Today—Black Friday—I am starting a new series on this Premial Atonement blog site.  These reflections started during a serious six-week bout with undulant fever that took me down during the spring of 2006.  That illness turned out to be one of the greatest blessings of my life.  A quarter century of wrestling with the nature and meaning of the Atonement came to a head and a kind of final clarity emerged that has taken years to unfold.  I shall be sharing those insights with you starting today.  I hope you can join me in this public elaboration.  I only hope I can keep up with any responses you may wish to contribute along the way.  Further clarification is sure to occur as we labor together.

I hope this serves as a fitting introduction to the Advent season just ahead.  May God bless us all!

Ron

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If salvation had been effected at the Cross, then many of us might not even exist, much less be saved.  The reason is simple.  If Jesus had saved himself there, by calling on “more than twelve legions of angels” (Matt. 26:53; cf. 27:39-43), his enemies could scarcely have stood a chance of surviving and, in any case, he would only have achieved the kingship over Israel, if that, since an angelic attack would have decimated his prospective subjects!  He could only win a kingdom over all the nations by way of over-compensation by being willing to pass all the way under the waters of death.  He traded the kingdom of Israel for the Kingdom of God over the universe!  Thus we non-Jews can enjoy salvation too.  [3/28/06]

Jesus himself suffered in the wake of witness intimidation.  His disciples, all of whom constituted an inner circle of witnesses to all his communications and activities, both public and private, could have come to his defense during his trial, yet all but one fled that fearful event.  Official (in this case) intimidation by the temple guards was sufficient to keep them at a ‘safe’ distance.  And the possibility of Peter’s being called to testify on Jesus’ behalf was enough to terrify him to turn tail.  [4/1/06]

The invidious separation forged by the early gnostic schismatic Marcion (died c. 160 A.D.) between a violently wrathful God of the Old Testament and a Jesus meek and mild severed the unity of the divine character and shattered the integrity of Their singular intention.  The authentic New Testament resurrectionary rationale for the abuse of Messiah by Satan became (if it had not already been) obscured by this imputed disharmony within Deity.

However, the false teacher Marcion’s misattribution of unjust violence to Jehovah and of feckless, sentimental love to Jesus created a two-headed monster out of the one God.  Furthermore, it impugned the consistent and uniform nature of God’s Justice in both testaments (covenants).  It sheared the Old Testament away from the New Testament.  The overcompensatory stipulations of Old Testament justice were deemed harsh and cruel, so the overcompensation of the Resurrection and Exaltation in return for the Crucifixion was not discerned as essentially identical with that earlier principle.  The so-called ‘Atonement‘ became an insoluble enigma.  Eventually. Marcion’s alleged ‘Old Testament‘ God inflicted His wrath on his ‘New Testament‘ God and the rest is grim history, which repeated itself during the Protestant Reformation, by a strange and needless irony.  [4/2/06]