Being ashamed and mortified by the hideous distortion of God’s character perpetrated (with all the best intentions) by penal substitution dogmatists should be distinguished emphatically from being “ashamed of the Gospel” (Rom. 1:16) as taught in Scripture in its own authentic, honest, robust terms. [6/28/11]
The imputing of false and alien attitudes to God (such as demanding that every sin be punished—even the “forgiven ones“!—in the person of an innocent substitute) can only result in detrimental effects on our attitudes concerning Him. Does anyone get this? This is serious, very serious indeed! Thus to impute our sins to Christ (for the sake of getting them punished “in him” by God’s wrath) is to impute injustice to God Himself! [6/28/11]
The teaching that God needed to punish someone. even His perfectly innocent and obedient Offspring, in order to forgive the sins of others, allegedly to accord with “justice,” is one hell of a doctrine! That such an expenditure of divine wrath could “satisfy” God’s justice, especially in the total absence of any show of restorative justice toward that innocent sufferer—and just to be clear, please remind yourself that you have honestly never heard any sincere and ardent advocate of penal substitution articulate the necessity (not to mention the urgency!) of God rendering any rectifying or reparative justice to Jesus in return for the horrors he wrongfully suffered at the cross, including the judicial lead-up to it [11/22/24]—utterly defies any logic brought forward by Holy Spirit in Holy Scripture. Wicked theology hereby defies the very Lord it loudly claims to honor, anaesthetizing sensitive consciences by scrambling words into toxic formulas alien to the sound patterns of the apostles. May God be merciful to their twisted souls, but exceedingly more merciful to the unsuspecting souls they are deluding and spiritually injuring, and rescue them decisively from this defiling miasma of reprehensible and disgraceful dogma. [6/29/11]
“ECONOMIZING” THE ATONEMENT
Calvinistic/Reformed soteriology is saturated with and captivated by the “necessities,” “requirements,” “absolutes,” “limits,” and “decrees” of a kind of economic absolutism regarding the Atonement. Accordingly, it “economizes” the “extent” and “application” of “penalties” and “benefits” of penal justice along with Christ’s alleged “satisfaction” for “indebtedness,” etc. Calvinistic theory, far, far more than the Anselmian theory, is shackled hand and foot to these actually “weak and poor” (Gal. 4:9) indeed, carnal elements of economic analogy, in starkest contrast to the actual usage of such guiding metaphors in Scripture, along with the linguistic controls placed upon them by multiple diverse contexts. In Calvinism, mundane economics sprawls undisciplined beyond control. Narrative contexts get dishonored or stripped away unceremoniously. Basic semantic elements of biblical thought get dissociated, distorted, and recombined into toxic end-products of theological legerdemain. [6/10/11]
Prof. Leon Morris’s culpable lumping together of the book of Romans along with Paul’s other epistles, in his well-known treatments of the cross in the New Testament, is a prime example of shoving the square peg of the resurrectionary Gospel into the round hole dug for the cross by the shovel of penal substitution. [7/1/11] Hence a book that never so much as mentions the cross anywhere (Romans) and therefore would appear to any candid mind to be an exceedingly awkward piece of evidence “for” Morris’s penal theory—an embarrassing outlier, to say the least—is brushed over to blend in with his failed hypothesis, and Prof. Morris stands guilty of tampering with the insuppressible evidence for a resurrection-centered…better yet, a resurrection-obsessed epistle that argues for doctrines of atonement, justification, and conciliation radically contradictory to the ones he has determined to impose everywhere without exception. Morris’s method is to apply a devious pseudo-scholarly uniformity over what he cannot sort out fairly or accurately. [11/17/24]
The general difficulty that Christians of virtually all traditions experience, when it comes to actually putting Christ’s commandments into practice, is that we no longer grasp the justice of God as having the intention or power of justifying us against our enemies (see scores of Psalms), especially during “the present wicked age” (Gal. 1:4). That weakness derives largely from viewing God’s justice as entirely penal, with no happy, vindicating upside! The premial element that rewards the righteous and restores their losses with a gracious surplus has dropped out of view completely, elbowed into the shadows by a shabby, blustering, domineering, “absolute,” punitive caricature more severe even than God’s rightfully penal justice toward the incorrigible! [7/1/11]
The premial exposition of Christ’s suffering of abuse does not glorify suffering per se; rather, it glorifies the persevering suffering of injustices WITHOUT REVILING, WITHOUT COMPLAINING, WITHOUT REVENGE, WITHOUT RETALIATION…IN SUM, WITHOUT SINNING. In shuddering contrast, penal substitution theory, in effect, nakedly ventures to offer only a morally repulsive substitutionary retaliation! For Jesus both taught and modeled WAITING FOR THE FATHER’S JUST AVENGING WITH DUE PENALTIES AND DUE REWARDS FAIRLY DIVVIED UP IN THE BARGAIN…ALL IN DUE TIME. [7/1/11]
The popular distinction between “freedom from the guilt of sin” and “freedom from the power of sin” is a mis-formulation skewed by the Protestant Reformation’s artificial distinction (nay, actual separation!) between “justification” and “sanctification”; “imputed” and “imparted”; “objective” and “subjective.” It amounts to a systematizing of the deception (Eph. 4:14) of penal substitution.
By contrast, the authentic premial inclusion or premial restitution doctrine of Christ’s apostles comprehends all of Christ’s just award from his Father, the Judge, as conveyed to believers exclusively by the gift of the Holy Spirit—both royal judicial righteousness and sacred priestly holiness alike. Thus the apostolic premial concept is fully integral (and, with undisguised irony, actually more “trinitarian” than the vaunted “orthodox” substitute). [7/1/11]
The Premial Atonement 