Satan was clueless that by slaying God’s Son he would automatically invoke God’s restorative justice to reverse that outrage with incomparable cosmic restitution, including his own ultimate deposing.

Satan had no clue that his divine Victim was going to RANSOM the human race from his diabolical clutches by escaping from death and Hades. He had absolutely no clue that by shedding Christ’s innocent blood, he would be evoking God’s justice to rescue him even from the extremity of death. Satan was totally clueless that his murder of the perfectly sinless “Lamb of God” would actually demand that God exert His faithfully covenanted promises declared in Israel’s holy Scriptures and call him back to life to inherit them!

Several patristic Christian authors were therefore quite mistaken to assert that there was some sort of agreement between God and Satan (as there had been some eighteen centuries earlier with Job—see note following Job 42:17, LXX). There was no deal with the Devil. He was caught totally by surprise, fair and square. [2/28/12; 11/12/25]

Old Testament justice required RESTITUTION by the offender to the victim. This was the “penalty” it demanded from the offender, and it is obviously restorative for the victim. Moreover, the restitution expected was not merely an equivalent restoration but entailed the addition of an extra or surplus as a ‘fee’ (‘penalty’ in the narrow sense). This superfluity was not intended as a ‘punitive’ measure for the offender, although it was certainly meant to have a sting! Yet it did actually have a ‘restorative’ effect for them, as well, for clearing their conscience via ‘making satisfaction’ (i.e., legal payment) for their theft, causing loss, injury, etc., to avert ongoing anger, reprisals, vendettas, blood feuds, clan wars, and similar cycles of revenge.

That entire system of criminal justice, therefore, fostered reconciliation and peacemaking. It can only with due qualification be termed “retributive” justice, even though it did stipulate paying back the victim, plus a bonus. This was not characterized in a vengeful or vindictive way, but simply required as an ‘evening up’ of the inequity introduced by the breach of the peace so as to restore the peace or shalom and defuse simmering wrath and brewing retribution. Hence, Darrin Snyder Belousek (Atonement, Justice, and Peace: The Message of the Cross and the Mission of the Church, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012) renders his analysis of divine justice liable to confusion. He would have to label or categorize premial (i.e., rewarding or restorative) justice as “retributive.” This designation poses an inner contradiction. He then proposes to dispose of all “retributive” justice, so interpreted, in favor of so-called “covenant(al) justice.” which is characterized by him as not “distributive” (i.e., “retributive,” so not presumably plagued by the reward/punishment dialectic). But since when was the ancient covenantal code of Moses not stamped with a binary distributive function? Although not after the fashion of much later Roman law, the Mosaic law had to deal with the same perennial realities of inter-human relations (and human-environment relations as well). These aims are not optional, dispensable, or replaceable. All societal law is intended to restore peace agreeably among contending or aggrieved parties…somehow.

Of course, in capital crimes it is not possible to make restitution properly by restoring what has been taken (think of murder, amputation, etc., but also lesser cases where the loss is irreparable or the injury irremediable). This presents difficulties that various civilizations and cultures have handled very differently. Yet they all alike are faced with the identical reality of death, which cannot be surmounted satisfactorily by nominal restoration in this age.

Accordingly, this is precisely the territory of human experience where a truly restorative solution was bound to gain universal attention and acclaim, if not acceptance. The contents of God’s proclamation about His Son is ideally suited to appeal to the ultimate need for a more powerful and more completely restorative and satisfying justice among human beings. Not only does God’s raising the Lord Jesus Christ from the dead provide “the final solution” to the problem of death, but its very circumstances and long prophetic anticipation frames it in such a manner that it necessarily alters the way all justice is viewed and administered…or at least should be. But personal habits are hard to change, and culture-wide habits harder still. Thus Western law has never adequately incorporated the premial premise and precepts of the Gospel into its criminal justice proceedings or institutions with anything like full consciousness, much less, consistency and rigor. However, the Restorative Justice (RJ) movement, launched in 1989 by Howard Zehr’s landmark book, Changing Lenses: Restorative Justice for Our Times, Third ed. (Harrisonburg, VA; Kitchener, Ontario: Herald Press, 2015), has launched a splendid revolution with that noble goal.

The elephant in the room is Roman law with its categories and procedures. Islamic law also entered Western Europe, notably during the Moorish era in Spain. These have came to domineer native legal traditions, but also to weigh in against uniquely Gospel-enlightened influences. [2/28/12; 11/12/25]

Roman distributive justice was intended to give each person his/her “due.” Isn’t this also what ancient Israelite justice was mandated with? Although not framed in these terms, God’s covenant was about returning to the injured what they were owed by their perpetrator, where possible. So “getting one’s deserts” was a central issue, although not construed in narrowly punitive terms and sanctions, and not bearing necessarily retributive overtones. Its purpose and practical function was to repair a breach of justice and so make peace by reconciling the conflicted parties.

So, when we come to the New Testament, we are not faced with an overturning of such traditional institutions of justice, for there was nothing inherently objectionable about them, per se. Instead, we behold in the Gospel the INTERVENTION of a JUSTICE powerful enough to repair and restore even from the injury of death itself. It could, moreover, give God’s sinless Son his due—his just deserts even after the ravages of torture and death had seemingly already decisively and irreversibly ‘conquered’! [2/28/12]

“ALL MY GOODNESS” Exodus 33:19

Jehovah’s words to Moses on Mt. Sinai amounted to an elaboration or elucidation of God’s righteousness/justice. This means that all of the characteristics mentioned there, including their nuancing and mutual conditioning, are elements of His Covenant justice toward His chosen people. The founding words at Sinai reveal the bedrock of all God’s royal actions toward Israel. God’s words are “cupelled seven times,” so are purified, worthy of our closest scrutiny. Compare especially Exodus 34:5-10; Numbers 14:17-24; Deuteronomy 7:9-11; Psalm 99:8.

Notice that there is a built-in ‘if-then’ subtext in these passages, showing that God’s justice is contingent on the responses of those creatures made in His own image and after His likeness. Therefore, when Israel’s God has a dispute (רִ֗יב) with them, He argues, cajoles, pleads, accuses, beseeches, hints, implores, queries, weeps, promises, warns, reminds, threatens, etc. Here is no rigid, harsh, unbending, vindictive, irritable, short-fused, unreasonable deity of popular misrepresentation. He bends over backwards to be reasonable. “Come, let us reason together, says the Lord.” (Isaiah 1:18)

Moreover, a God this gracious, loving, merciful, tolerant, longsuffering, and full of lovingkindness and benignity has the right to make ‘reasonable’ demands of his Covenant partners, His continual supply of “good things” to His children qualifies Him to warn them sternly against indulging in evil things that would harm others and themselves. [3/1/12; 11/12/25]

Law, Criminal Justice, Restorative Justice, Retribution, Restitution, Reconciliation

ALLARD, Pierre (-)

***__________.  “Christianity:  The Rediscovery of Restorative Justice,” in The Spiritual Roots of Restorative Justice, pp. 119-41.  Edited by Michael L. Hadley.  Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001.  {23p.}

BELL, Jr., Daniel M. (1966-)

**__________.  “Justice and Liberation,” in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, pp. 182-95.  Edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Sam Wells.  Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.  {14p.}

BERMAN, Harold J[oseph]. (1918-2007)

***__________.  “Religious Foundations of Law in the West: An Historical Perspective,” Journal of Law and Religion, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Summer 1983): 3-43.  {41p.}

***__________.  “Theological Sources of the Western Legal Tradition,” in Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, pp. 165-198; notes, pp. 591-599.  Cambridge, MA / London, UK: Harvard University Press, 1983.  {34p.; 9p.}

BONTRAGER, William D. “Bill” (-)

**__________.  “A Theory on the Implications of the Atonement of St. Anselm.”  Shepherds for Peace.  {3p.}  Online:  http://www.shepherdsforpeace.com/writings/ANSELM.php (accessed 10/20/2009).

__________.  “Comparing Governance/Law of State and Church.”  Shepherds for Peace.  {5p.}  Online: http://www.shepherdsforpeace.com/writings/comparing_lawchurch.php (accessed 10/20/2009).

**__________.  In Search of Justice.  {124p.}

**__________.  Restorative Justice: A Primer.  {120p.}

BRUNK, Conrad G[rebel]. (1945-)

__________.  “Restorative Justice and the Philosophical Theories of Criminal Punishment.”  In The Spiritual Roots of Restorative Justice, pp. 31-56.  Edited by Michael L. Hadley.  Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001.  {26p.}

CARLSON, David R. (-)

**__________, editor.  Contributing editors, Daniel W. Van Ness and Evelyn Bence.  Beyond Crime and Punishment: Restorative Justice.  Washington, DC: Prison Fellowship, 1991.  {30p.}

COREY, Benjamin L. (1976-)

***__________.  “Justice Broken: How a Poor Theology of the Cross Created America’s Broken Justice System.”  Formerly Fundie: The Official Blog Post of Benjamin L. Corey, January 27, 2014; http://www.patheos.com/blogs/formerlyfundie/broken-justice/ last accessed April 21, 2014.

CRAGG, Wesley (-)

__________.  The Practice of Punishment: Towards a Theory of Restorative Justice.  London and New York: Routledge, 1992.  {x, 255?}

ELLUL, Jacques (1912-94)

**__________.  The Theological Foundation of Law.  Translated from the French by Marguerite Wieser.  New York: Doubleday & Co., 1960.  {140p.}  (Le Fondement Theologique du Droit.  Neuchatel and Paris: Editions Delachaux & Niestle S.A., 1946.)  [Overlooks the premial side of “retributive” justice, and therefore takes recourse to a “substitutive” as over against either “distributive” or “retributive” justice.]

FOUCAULT, Michel (1926-84)

__________.  Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison.  Translated by Alan Sheridan.  London: Penguin, 1977; New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

GORRINGE, Timothy J[ervis]. (1946-)

***__________.  God’s Just Vengeance: Crime, Violence and the Rhetoric of Salvation.  Cambridge Studies in Ideology and Religion 9.  Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.  {xiv, 280p.}

GRIFFITH, Lee (1948-)

__________.  The War on Terrorism and the Terror of God.  Eerdmans, 2002.

HADLEY, Michael L. (1956-)

__________, ed.  The Spiritual Roots of Restorative Justice.  Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001.  {}

KOHN, Alfie (1957-)

__________.  Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes.  With a New Afterword by the Author.  Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999 (1993).  {xiv, 431p.}

MARSHALL, Christopher D. (-)

**__________.  Beyond Retribution: A New Testament Vision for Justice, Crime, and Punishment.  Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans; Aukland, N.Z.; Sydney, Australia: Lime Grove House Publishers, 2001.  [Yet ironically, it lacks a consistently restorative paradigm of the Atonement itself, so its cogency suffers; see esp. pp. 53-69, 172-3, 301.]

**__________.  “Grounding Justice in Reality: Theological Reflections on Overcoming Violence in the Criminal Justice System.”  In Overcoming Violence in New Zealand, pp. 81-95.  Edited by J. Roberts.  Wellington, N.Z.: Philip Garside Publishers, 2002.  {15p.}

MOBERLY, Sir W[alter]. H[amilton]. (1881-1974)

**__________.  The Ethics of Punishment.  London: Faber, 1968.  {}

NAGASAWA, Mako A. (1972-)

***__________.  “Donald Trump’s Scapegoating and the Myth of Retributive Justice, Part 1.  [Boston]: New Humanity Institute, posted February 12, 2016.  {[c. 7+]p.}  Online:

***__________.  “Is Retributive or Restorative Justice the Highest Form of God’s Justice?  Does Atonement Theology Impact Criminal Justice?”  [Boston]: New Humanity Institute, posted

__________.  “A Neuroscientific Reason for Why Retributive Justice is from the Fall, and Penal Substitution is Immature.”  [Boston]: New Humanity Institute, posted April 28, 2016.  {[c. 15+]p.}  Online:

NICHOLS, Joel A.  See WITTE Jr., John J.

QUICK, O[liver]. C[hase]. (1885-1944)

**__________.  Christianity and Justice.  News-Letter Series.  1940.  {}  (?)

ROSENBAUM, Thane (1960-)

**__________.  The Myth of Moral Choice: Why Our Legal System Fails to Do What’s Right.  New York: HarperCollins, 2004.  {xiii, 364p.}

**__________.  Payback: The Case for Revenge.  Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013.  {[ix], 314p.}

SNYDER, T. Richard (1936-)

__________.  The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Punishment.  Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001.  {xii, 159p.}  [Strangely, he never explores the connection between Restorative Justice in the criminal justice system or in the Atonement!]

SPOONER, Lysander (1808-87)

__________.  An Essay on the Trial by Jury.  Boston: John P. Jewett and Co. / Cleveland, OH: Jewett, Proctor & Worthington, 1852.  {224p.}  [An eloquent and exceedingly well-crafted elucidation of the history and value of the jury system.]

STAHL, Friedrich Julius (1802-61)

__________.  Rechtsphilosophie (II, 1, No. 56-59).

TORRANCE, Alan J.  (1956-)

VAN NESS, Daniel W. (1949-)

*__________.  Crime and Its Victims.  Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986.  {}

*__________, et al.  Restorative Justice: Theory.  Washington, DC: Prison Fellowship, 1989.  {}

*__________, et al.  Restorative Justice: Principles.  Washington, DC: Prison Fellowship, 1990.  {}

*__________, et al.  Restorative Justice: Practice.  Washington, DC: Prison Fellowship, 1990.  {}

*__________, and Karen Heetderks Strong.  Restoring Justice.  Second edition.  Ellen S. Boyne, Editor; Elizabeth A. Shipp, Assistant Editor.  Cincinnati: Anderson Publishing Co., 2001 (1997).  {}

VOLF, Miroslav (1956-)

***__________.  “Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Justice.”  Chapter twelve in Stricken by God?: Nonviolent Identification and the Victory of Christ,” pp. 268-86.  Edited by Brad Jersak and Michael Hardin.  Grand Rapids, MI / Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2007.  {19p.}

WINK, Walter (1935-2012)

__________.  “Breaking the Spiral of Violence: The Power of the Cross,” in Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, pp. 139-155.  Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992.  {17p.}

WITTE Jr., John J. (1959-)

***__________.  God’s Joust, God’s Justice: Law and Religion in the Western Tradition.  Emory University Studies in Law and Religion, John Witte Jr., general editor.  Grand Rapids, MI / Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2006.  {xiv, 498p.}

WITTE Jr., John J. (1959-) and Joel A. NICHOLS (1972-)

__________.  Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment.  Fourth Edition.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.  {xiv, 403p.}

WOLTERSTORFF, Nicholas (1932-)

***__________.  Justice in Love.  Now with a new preface.  Emory University Studies in Law and Religion, John Witte Jr., general editor.  Grand Rapids, MI / Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 2015 (2011).  {xvii, 285p.}

**__________.  Justice: Rights and Wrongs.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.  {}

YODER, John Howard (1927-97)

__________.  “Theological Critique of Violence,” New Conversations 16 (1994): 3-6.  {4p.}

ZEHR, Howard (1944-)

__________.  Changing Lenses—A New Focus for Crime and Justice.  Third edition.  Herald Press, 2005 [1990, 1995].  {}

__________.  The Little Book of Restorative Justice.  Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2002.  {[iv], 72p.}  [Not a word is mentioned about Jesus Christ, his cross, resurrection, atonement, or God’s justice in this little guide by “the grandfather of restorative justice.”  Sadly, this is quite in line with the absence of a “restorative justice” approach to any of these topics—i.e., to the Gospel message itself!—in the otherwise worthy writings of most Anabaptist and other Peace Tradition theologians I have so far encountered.  I find this puzzling in the extreme.]

An OPEN LETTER to Jesse Morrell and FRIENDLY CRITIQUE of The Vicarious Atonement of Christ (2012), part 6

Now I have a few observations concerning the notion of “government” itself, because Grotius places so much stress on the concept within his theory.

God’s “government” over mankind was not altered in its sanctions by the atoning or justifying work of Jesus Christ. Paul sketches that “government” in the epistle to the Romans from mid-chapter one through mid-chapter three, in its bearing both on Israel and on the other nations, then later recurs to it in chapters twelve and thirteen. And, note well, this “government” bears little resemblance to that which Hugo Grotius, for all his brilliance as the inaugurator of the “law of nations” (now called international law), elaborated in his novel governmental theory of the Atonement. He might have gone back to Old Testament Scripture for an accounting of how God ruled the nations. He could have taken stock of the key defining differences between the Old Testament (Covenant) and the New Testament (Covenant), and most particularly the radically altered status of the Law of Moses. Instead he spun out a natural-law-dependent theory of “moral law” that steamrollers the whole Bible flat, without nuancing or even passing notice of the vast gulf fixed between these covenant administrations (as far as I have yet encountered). Had he paid attention to these defining traits, he might have observed that the power unleashed by the New Covenant in Christ’s blood was derived exclusively from the premial necessity of God’s justice and not in the least from its penal function. This means that Paul’s treatment of God’s revelation of His wrath against unrighteousness, whether of Gentiles or Jews, does not even figure into the internal mechanics of the Atonement, justification, conciliation, etc. Instead, starting in mid-chapter three of his epistle to the Roman Christians, Paul delineates the amazingly “other” way God devised for dealing with the actual target of His wrath: hardened, callused sinners.

The premial solution to the threat of recurrent wrath, due to buildup and hardening up of sinfulness, is such a radical departure from the old penal measures of Moses, even superior as those were to the often shockingly brutal and perverse ways of the other nations, that we must prepare ourselves to do “violence” to our inherited traditional assumptions (and whatever criminal, legal, or juridical experience we may have culled till now via our cultural conditioning) in order to come to grips with an angle on justice that rattles our penal cages and disarms our self-protective armor and weaponry.

By taking recourse to permitting the aggravated victimization of His own “flesh and blood”—His only-born Son, ever obedient and well pleasing—God set the stage to make His very own historical appearance as definitively as imaginable for One Who is, in principle, invisible: He brought back to corporeal life that Loved One who, although divinely begotten before the ages of time began to roll, descended himself in time by taking on our mortal nature, now banned from the Tree of Life due to Adam’s sin, in the usual way of conception (although by an invisible Father), birth from a descendant of Israel’s King David, child rearing, maturation to adulthood, and then, for the ultimate benefit of us doomed mortals (thus, now symptomatically, sinners by reflex), acted out visibly the character of his invisible Father in Heaven, to perfection, and thereby provoked the predictable backlash of the petty sovereigns under the control of the kingdom of darkness then pervading the whole world. Accordingly, by their stripping him of his corporal existence—his rightful property, long hallowed for this rescuing purpose—God could now strategically play His rightful hand at the propitious moment of the cosmic war games and thus rout the diabolical advances of evil wherever and whenever this proclamation gains a believing hold in human hearts.

By submitting to the wrongful depriving of his exemplary life, allowing sinners to shed his faithful, innocent blood, Jesus of Nazareth could resolutely and justifiably expect justice from on high as “immediately” as commensurate with a credible certification of death, i.e., a tactical delay until the third day after his demise by execution (untimely by human reckoning of what an heir apparent to David’s “eternal” throne should be able to expect “from life”). For that justice entailed a premially magnifying factor to him—virtual spoils of his triumph over Satan’s ultimate weapon of mass destruction, totalitarian human mortality.

Those “damages” came in the form of a resurgence of God’s own life-making Spirit of wholesomeness that embraced the mortal remains of His cruelly abused offspring with an explosive compassion that radiated with a seismic shudder across our darkened planet after Pentecost in 30 A.D. The carefully trained disciples of Jesus, now the risen Lord of all nations, without fleshly inhibitions, received the overflow of that Spirit of graciousness to expel demons, heal the sick, cure lepers, and raise the dead, at their discretion, as signs of this freshly inaugurated Kingdom, in order to vindicate all the claims of Jesus to be the Messiah of Israel and now also Lord of all other nations as well, and to accredit his Proclamation of rescue to every descendant of Adam who believes and stays faithful.

The “Governmental” theory of Atonement unravels at the point of retribution. It vastly overemphasizes penal justice while it neglectfully overlooks premial justice. The seriousness of this quirk can itself hardly be overemphasized. This is because penal justice (…at least God’s) plays no role whatsoever in the Atonement. Only and exclusively this high and holy cosmic event unreels the staggering nuclear forces of God’s premial justice in full swing. This is the “either/or” alternative par excellence. Here there can be no compromise, no blending, no segueing, no scrambling and mushing. This is the “black-and-white” issue without equal.

The whole Governmental Theory shatters upon this Rock of premial necessity and exclusivity in relation to the ATONEMENT. That theory’s proportionality is all wrong, reversed, in fact antithetical to God’s revealed emphasis at the “Crossurrection” events. In those unparalleled episodes God was unveiling “THE GOODS”—THAT PART OF “DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE” THAT ONLY MEAGERLY GOT DISTRIBUTED HISTORICALLY THERETOFORE. Governmental theory virtually IGNORES “HALF” OF THE LAW—THE BETTER HALF! It weighs in very heavily on punitive sanctions, but manages to shuffle and slide right past God’s restorative sanctions. Even merely in relation to human governmental institutions of justice (including the ancient Mosaic/Levitical) this is grossly, grotesquely ONE-SIDED. But relative to the divine method of Atonement this BLIND-SIDING must be ruled “FOUL!” and not merely offside. It is nothing less than a hideous distortion of Scripture, and must therefore issue in a fundamental distortion of created reality. The behavioral effects of such disproportionate doctrine must follow as day follows night, for both of these sequences are covenantal realities sustained by divine bonds of troth. We cannot simply skirt over half the truth without giving a false coloring to the half we think we can see “perfectly.”

Turning now to some of your own pieces, Jesse. You build up such a head of steam for punishment in “The Purpose of Punishment” and “What the Purpose of Punishment is Not,” that your momentum appears to bulldoze reward into oblivion. You don’t appear to write a single word about restitution or reward or recompense or compensation, i.e. PREMIAL RETRIBUTION, in those two pivotal sections of your online version of The Vicarious Atonement of Christ, pp. 10-13. This oversight (actually, a systematic suppression by the Governmental Theory tradition…we might even somewhat whimsically dub this Governmental suppression of premial dissent!) is fatal to the ultimate success of this theological theory of the Atonement. The sooner we acknowledge this repentantly and wholeheartedly, the more effectively we can evangelize those people groups that are justifiably offended by any penal theory of Atonement.

Within theology, a little repentance goes a long way. Fundamental changes of conception are so difficult to forge that when a solid footpath is finally beaten through the jungle of entrenched neologisms, a rush of fresh traffic can serve to preserve the new thoroughfare back to apostolic simplicity expeditiously. The Bible, after all, is such a surprising book: it stands everything (especially a carnal theory) on its head!

From observing your behavior with people in crowds, you are not one to flinch at attacks. How much less should you flinch at well-meant (if not always well-directed, I suppose) attempts at correction that you may be yet more fruitful! You don’t strike me as one who would settle for running stuck half way between John Calvin and the full glory of the Truth.

~to be continued~

An OPEN LETTER to Jesse Morrell and FRIENDLY CRITIQUE of The Vicarious Atonement of Christ (2012), part 5

The so-called “Governmental” theory of the Atonement, in my estimation, appears to be a lengthy and tedious detour around the authentic premial nature of the Atonement. Its diversions into the fragility of human government and its dilations on the “necessities” of exemplary, public, punitive justice and penal exactions, although evidently well-meant attempts to outflank full-bore penal, economically-qualified, satisfaction theories, are in the end, themselves unsatisfactory. It is a wobbly careening away from the positive face of God’s exclusively atoning (“protectively sheltering”) premial justice awarded directly to Christ Jesus.

Because the “Governmental” theory of atonement does not start at the center of the Gospel—the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead—it lingers endlessly over matters of mere forgiveness of sins (important as that is for our present well-being and peace of mind), including its conditions and grounds, the punishments otherwise suffered, how God can be just and still merciful, and so forth. But from all this dilatory elaboration, one is left with feelings of ennui, exhaustion. Such defenses of so-called “Moral Law” systems somehow lack the virtues of conclusiveness, exuberance, simplicity, and emotional appeal. They seem, in short, sterile, inert, overwrought, and non-intuitive. In effect, they lack moral influence (ironically). Despite these fatal drawbacks, they may still cover much valuable ground, but it simply is not atoning ground. For to attain atoning virtue, we must explain, indeed proclaim, the justice that overcame death, and hence overcame sin and all lesser enemies. Governmental theories start at the wrong end of evil. Christ’s resurrection is only conspicuous by its absence from their treatises as any vital, indispensable, pivotal, activating factor.

That said, the Governmental view still stands heads (if not quite shoulders) above the Penal Satisfaction view of Calvinism. Yet it is similarly saddled with an exclusively penal conception of justice (but more exemplarist than economic), so the poor beast hobbles and lists always to one side. And because it is penal it must logically employ substitution in its soteriology. It is unable to break away from the disturbing conundrums that have ever afflicted Calvinism in all its broad variations, writhing to escape unsavory implications, painful accusations. Accordingly, far from being the best theory of the Atonement, it comes off second worst.

The Governmental theory of the Atonement fails resoundingly in its “allowance” hypothesis concerning why God can forgive sins. Although denouncing the out-and-out Penal Satisfaction assertion that God needs to satisfy His “personal” wrath against sin in favor of “governmental” wrath (and, by the by, relieving God of “personal vindictiveness” only at the cost of rendering their scheme calculating and impersonal), yet God’s freedom gets corseted by denying Him the authority, right, and power to exert graciousness until He has executed enough governmentally expedient wrath. This is yet another wretched result of totally ignoring premial justice and limiting the entire discussion to penal concerns alone, whether economic or rectoral. God is not permitted even to merely remit sins, much less bestow everlasting life, unless He first shores up His otherwise sagging justice (penal only, of course) lest His kingdom crumble.

However, what about God’s sagging (in fact virtually nonexistent) restorative justice? Shouldn’t He feel obliged to give some concern to rewarding the upright, especially when they have been viciously attacked and left for dead? Will God’s Kingdom (founded on justice!) collapse only if the murderers “are not punished,” but yet somehow inexplicably, miraculously, not suffer demise if the righteous himself is left dead? How is this imbalance justified? Isn’t such merely penal justice—whether “personal” or “governmental”—ultimately worthless unless the righteous get rewarded, raised to agelong life? Doesn’t God’s entire Kingdom hang, finally, on whether He can perform the ultimate justice of super-compensating every injustice, as supremely demonstrated by raising Jesus from the grave? Isn’t He publicly represented as disgracefully inept if He devotes all His divine energies to assure penally “retributive” justice gets thoroughly executed against…someone, lest He look like a celestial wimp, and His Kingdom turn to dust, and yet “leaves undone” the greater “retributive” justice of giving the upright their just due? Do I hear an “Amen!” for heaven’s sake?

Why would the Lord Jesus have cried, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” if that same God were all along inflicting wrath until that moment? This scenario does not quite compute. Alternatively, had God been comforting His beloved Son in his mortal distress until that plea, but thereupon began pouring out His wrath on the pathetic sufferer to intensify his wretched agonies? If so, then had Jesus been experiencing his Father’s favor and graciousness only up to that “turning point”? This, too, strains sound judgment and lacks the backing of explicit Scriptures. Furthermore, it contravenes even penal substitution theories, which insist that the entire previous proceedings were evidence of God’s wrath against him “in our place,” “as our substitute,” none of which dare be mitigated, at the cost of compromising the “vicarious payment of sufferings to God’s penal justice” whose very magnitude constituted the measure of salvation that we need (whether for the whole world, or for all who believe, or even just for “the elect” who are “pre”-destined alone to believe).

Without belaboring that holy scene of a tortured Savior with the added indignity of a tortured logic, let us direct our minds to another (dare I say “satisfying”?) scenario: God’s graciousness never for so much as a nanosecond departed from the Son of His love throughout his life and career on earth, much less the ordeals of his final hours. No wrath from God could possibly have defiled that scene with His shedding of innocent, faithful blood. This was an Enemy’s doing! Satan’s leash was cut by God so he could culminate his criminal career with a crowning achievement of wickedness that would (happily) make necessary divine intervention of a true justice that surprised the whole universe by avenging that extreme vivisection with a rightful super-compensation of extreme vivification, a diametrically opposite crowning achievement of goodness that alone could launch a new creation!

The drawing power of the Story about Jesus’ crucifixion (and, indeed, its “moral influence”) belongs not to a bare recounting of his terrible suffering there but to the “rest of the Story” about Who he actually was, what he had been teaching, the wonders of healing he had been doing for everyone, and the bitter envy, jealousy, and hatred of his nation’s leaders toward him. But “the rest of the Story” whose “moral influence” must be taken into account supremely concerns his resurrection from the dead! For only that event revealed unequivocally, unambiguously, and conclusively that, all along, he had been the Messiah incognito! It is only this “little” piece of the Puzzle—it must be little, right?, or how could Penal Substitutionary theologians of all stripes have missed it for so very, very long?—that precipitated the shocking revelation that this man whom we crucified (gulp!) really was the Son of God, and yet both he and God let us get away with the infamous and treacherous deed scot-free…at least for the time being!

It is the rest of the Story that brought the house down in amazed, wondrous, grateful applause and propelled the multitudes to rush back to God in Christ for His stupendous love and unfathomable graciousness! It was this whole, complete, integral Story that causes conciliation to happen and that makes peace break forth on earth and delight among mankind. For only this fuller context of Scripture demonstrates convincingly not only God’s delight at the manger-birth, but also His lovingkindness toward human beings at the Cross-death, as well.

The altar of sacrifice was the place of death, but the Ark of the Covenant was the place of life. We must weigh the revealing significance of the distance between them. Hence the protective cover on top of the ark was “renewed,” “reactivated,” or “refreshed” once a year by spattering the blood of an unblemished, flawless (figuring a blameless, innocent, sinless) living soul, which was slain on the altar. That blood symbolized the living soul of the wrongly slain animal legally demanding retribution and accordingly receiving it direct from God in the miraculous form of restored life, now transmitting abundant life and wholesomeness and cleansing and release (forgiveness/pardon) from sins and renewal, in turn, to whatever was spattered or sprinkled or splashed with it.

The Day of Atonement (i.e., of protective covering) depicted prophetically both the murder of the Lamb of God on the “altar” of the cross, and his resurrection into a life-making Spirit to cleanse and hallow heaven and earth by employing the ritual symbolism of spattering the blood on the protective cover of the Ark of the Covenant in the “Holy of Holies” (i.e., the holiest place of all)—the Heaven of heavens…God’s throne.

This all means that Romans 3:25-26 is not at all speaking of the “sacrifice of” Atonement, i.e., the cross of Christ, the antitype of the altar in the ancient Levitical ceremony, but of the Ark itself, containing the elements for sustaining, protecting, and directing toward life.

The current stage of the perennial Atonement controversy seems to come down to this watershed question: Is God more honored and glorified by His destroying the wicked or by His rewarding the upright? Or to state the matter with a related question: Is God’s law more honored by Him punishing the lawbreaker or by Him rewarding the law-abiding…and the more so when they suffer at the hands of the lawless?

The issue at stake (ahem) should not have had to come down to such stark alternatives, because in the Bible the two “options” are often linked within the comprehensive system of restorative justice wherein the offender, when apprehended, is required to restore the loss directly to their victim, with interest! Thus their penalty is channeled to reward the one they harmed.

However, the Western legal tradition during the decisive eras when the now dominant satisfaction theories were in their swaddling clothes (whether Anselm’s earlier non-penal, feudal version of honorial satisfaction to a lord, or Calvin’s later explicitly and severely penal and commercial version of satisfying law or “justice”) was biased toward a preoccupation with penalization without a corresponding emphasis on restorative restitution. (Refer to the masterful chapter by Harold Berman, “Theological Sources of the Western Legal Tradition,” in Law and Revolution.) So justice became unbalanced in a vindictive, vengeful, punitive vein that deprived victims of their proper due. The state should have intervened as the arbiter between offender and victim, assuring that amends (including suitable and proportional penalties added for the benefit and compensating enrichment of the aggrieved victim, and not routinely diverted to the state instead) are fairly made. This punitively skewed juridical tradition entrenched a habit of thinking that minimized and marginalized the rightful due that the premial facet of justice required, in favor of the outsized dominance of the penal.

The disadvantaging, when not in fact silencing, of the premial concerns of integral justice has dictated repercussions in theology that are profoundly detrimental to the well-being of the church, not to mention of all those who have been too offended or puzzled by its compromised Gospel of one-sidedly penal justice to ever darken the door of a church. And this distressing state of affairs is only likely to raise up yet more enemies until the premial is reintegrated with the penal epicenter of justice, particularly with reference to the nature of atonement and justification, but also conciliation.

So back to the initial question, is it credible that God is more honored before thoughtful people by delighting in the destruction of the incorrigible evildoer or by celebrating the worthy accomplishments of the resolutely honest and even rewarding them when they suffer injustices at the hands of evildoers? The answer should be intuitively obvious, even if we didn’t have abundant and explicit Scriptures to decide the question. But if this is so, then why has the gratifying truth not ever sifted down into the nitty gritty of theological reflection about atonement, justification, and conciliation? The application seems so evident, so easy, so salutary! So sad, then, that the therapeutic application has not been hitherto forthcoming! This neglect leaves theology and the church-at-large bereft of a winsome and sensibly conciliatory message that truly honors God’s most winning traits and endearing preferences. Regardless of all makeshifts, all soft-pedaling, all excuse making, all truth-stretching, God comes off looking grim, unfair, vindictive, overly-punctilious, or otherwise pathologically disposed. This is not good.

In principle, Jesus shattered a cartload of preconceptions that had collected around Israel’s God among all classes of the population. But as each successive rabbinic generation “played telephone” with the following one, syllables got dropped, words got forgot, punctuation got switched, and the Message of God’s spectacular graciousness got garbled into a penal caricature of God’s premial character.

~to be continued~

God’s Overcompensating Justice and the final destiny of lost angels vs. lost human beings

If it is true that according to the New Testament lost human beings actually get ultimately destroyed or exterminated for the ages to come, then why do Satan and his messengers, the Beast and the False Prophet, not likewise get exterminated instead of experiencing agelong torment (provided Scripture is not indulging in rhetorical metaphor, which would seem incongruent, even in this book of prophetic symbolism, Rev. 1:1, cf. Acts 11:28)?  Might not the reason be precisely because those beings have been intentionally instrumental in the ultimate destruction of all those precious human souls?  This would appear to be quite in line with God’s style of overcompensating justice.  God not only overcompensated Jesus, the ultimate Victim, but He likewise overcompensated Satan, the ultimate Victimizer.  It is not because Satan or his messengers (any more than God’s) have been endowed with some sort of ‘inherent immortality’ (about which all Scripture appears significantly silent).

However, there appear to remain a couple of kinds or degrees of destruction/loss (απωλεια): 1) extermination (ωλεχθρ-, 2 Thess. 1:6-10; cf. Rev. 20:8-9) for unrepentant human beings, and 2) torment for the ages of the ages (Rev. 20:10, 14:9-11) for Satan and his minions, the beast and his image, along with their worshipers (which are not in that contextual scenario intimated to symbolize ‘all unbelievers’, as some readers may wish to infer).

Jesus, the Messiah, because of his voluntary suffering of abuse has been exalted to be Master of the whole universe and Head of the church, his body of spiritual contents with which everything in the universe is getting filled (adapting Eph. 1:22-23).  [4/10/02]