The Calvinistic Doctrine of Sin Comports with Its Dubious Doctrine of Salvation, Therefore Both Need to Be Corrected Simultaneously

“The just one by faith shall be living” (ho dikaios ek pisteos zesetai), Rom. 1:17, Gal. 3:11, Heb. 10:38 (adapted from Hab. 2:4). In the briefest possible compass, this pivotal declaration encapsulates the very essence of Covenantal justice/righteousness. It asserts that the righteousness/justice of the human partner to the Covenant, which is characterized by faithfulness to God, i.e., resolute obedience to His Covenantal directives/ commandments/ precepts (in other words, God’s will/desire), is met and matched (actually overmatched) by the justice/righteousness of the divine Partner to the Covenant (an ancient form of Divine-human treaty spelled out in Deuteronomy), stipulating life or living, plus its protection, as just due for the loyal/faithful human partner). The ethical requirements to which the Covenant bound its respective parties were different for each. The divine Suzerain unilaterally stipulated the faithful keeping of His directives as the kind of righteousness (dikaiosune) He desired from His human partners; in turn He promised to faithfully foster and protect life for all who obeyed Him accordingly as the kind of justice (dikaiosune) He would pay them in return. Accordingly, Jesus linked these two sides of the Covenant’s obligations together in his terse epigram: “His [God’s] directive is life agelong” (he entole autou zoe aionios estin), John 12:50.

Furthermore, it was this kind of human faithfulness to the agelong covenant/treaty (Heb. 13:20) that Jesus came to earth to render to his Father through the agelong Spirit (Heb. 9:14) in order to secure agelong redemption (Heb. 9:12) for the rest of us, namely, the divinely promised agelong inheritance (Heb. 9:15), currently enjoyed in part by our foretaste of His earnest, pledge, or down payment—the Covenant blessing of the Holy Spirit that renders even us non-Jews sons of God through Abraham’s Seed (Christ) by sonship or sonhood (traditionally translated “adoption,” but unique in details). [2/13/12; 7/29/25]

One reason why Calvinistic doctrine has led to so much punitive and penal rigor is that its penal payment theory has severely twisted it’s doctrine of sin (on top of everything else!). It characterizes any and every sin as arousing God’s reflexive prickly wrath, THUS DENYING FORCEFULLY THAT GOD IS SLOW TO GET ANGRY. This doctrinaire Reformed misrepresentation of God’s character as ‘trigger-happy’ is a slur on God’s patient disposition of mercy, kindness, and forbearance or tolerance. This is a very serious mischaracterization, but Calvinistic casting agents have managed to perpetuate this role-constricted typecasting for God despite massive Scripture to the contrary. And worse, they take great pride in their imagined “high view of sin,” which comes only at the high cost of a low view of God’s mercy, tolerance, patience, and kindness. The price is much too stiff, fostering smug callousness, self-righteous disdain, punitive overreaction, mock horror, and more—for if even God cannot actually sustain such an attitude of non-stop ire and stern disfavor in the face of the generality of human peccadillos and constitutional selfishness, how can sinful theologians pull it off with any degree of verisimilitude or aplomb—without an off-putting overcast of irritability (not a pretty picture of the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!)? The atrocities committed in the name of the Calvinistic God-caricature compare ‘favorably’ with the medieval mindset of the Roman Catholic (emphasis on Roman) church with its purgatorial and inquisitorial legacy of forced penance at sword point or ordeal by iron lady! (Body-piercing is nothing new; thumbscrews are out; waterboarding is in.)

In conclusion, the traditional Protestant doctrine of sin cries out in anguish for REFORMATION without delay or self-justifying excuses!

That a distorted doctrine of the Atonement can reflexively lead to distortions of the doctrine of Sin, or at least perpetuation of them, is only to be expected. It would be highly surprising in fact if, having reformed the doctrine of Atonement to conform with the restorative justice of God, we were not to run across incompatible holdovers, incongruous atavisms from medieval notions of sin, including redemptive penal suffering as its divine cure. [2/22/12; 8/1, 3/25]

If righteousness is “not through law,” i.e., not through attempts by sinners to keep it flawlessly (since that’s flatly impossible for them), but through the flawless faithfulness of Jesus Christ (since that was happily possible for him!), then the latter assuredly need not have demanded wrath, which the Law of Moses threatened for aggravated lawlessness. Instead, Christ’s faithful obedience to his Father blessed him non-stop with His favor or graciousness. It was in this graciousness that Jesus “tasted death for the sake of every person” (Heb. 2:9) by dying on the cross under the fury and indignation of Satan and his human pawns. By a delightful irony of poetic (far from prosaic!) justice, this injurious and ultimately lethal assault and bloodshed cried out for immediate and visibly public justice, handily forthcoming on the Third Day in Christ’s resurrection from the dead and the glory following. [2/23/12]

If you happened to arrive at the realization that the Lord Jesus Christ might not or could not or should not (for whatever conjectured reasons) have suffered God’s wrath and condemnation at the Cross, what evidence in Scripture would you start looking for to confirm or disconfirm such a thesis? How would you sustain your assumption? What sort of exegetical mistakes would you start suspecting traditional theology of perpetrating? What reasons would you start guessing lay behind these misrepresentations? What kind of reactions and rationalizations would you expect from the defenders of the traditional position? How would you approach the task of correcting their misconceptions? Would you ever expect the kind of reactions Jesus got from the chiefs, lawyers, scribes and Pharisees of his day? How did he handle their arguments and ensuing criminal behavior? Would you emulate him? What might follow? [2/23/12; 8/825]

The process of “imputing faith for [eis, “into” or “as,” reflecting an accounting sitz im leben) justness/ righteousness” was never intended as the summum bonum of a believer’s saving benefits, but only as the qualifying condition for receiving “the Gift of [i.e., issuing from (God’s)] justice [to the Lord Jesus for his obedient submission to wrongly exacted bloodshed—Rom. 5:19, the precursor to 6:16, 15:18, & 16:19, all alike sandwiched between Rom. 1:5 and 16:26]” (Rom. 5:17), in other words, the Holy Spirit dispensed via Christ’s ushering in the New Covenant in his sinlessly innocent blood. This is the actual, substantive “dispensing of righteousness/justice” (2 Cor. 3:9) that constitutes the reality of that New Covenant. It enters this age and space when we trust Jesus as Christ, the Lord, and it culminates in the coming age when we actually inherit our portion in the Kingdom of God. So “imputed righteousness” (as orthodox Protestant tradition spins it) is in reality but the threshold of “imparted righteousness” (i.e., the Holy Spirit), which is none other than “the unspeakable Gift” of 2 Cor. 9:15. [2/23/12; 7/31/25; 8/1/25]

I find it interesting and gratifying to observe that after I arrived at and settled upon the premises concerning the nature of the Lord’s (wrongful) sufferings at the Cross and God’s (rightful) justice at his Resurrection, all the corollary exegetical adjustments started to cascade steadily, if not exactly smoothly, into place. Many of these moves seemed to have defenders somewhere or other along the extended sojourn of subsequent historical theology. However, not all these diverse exegetical thrusts succeeded in entering the mainstream. A few seemed to be stalled and parked on theological sidetracks gathering dust and rust, abandoned and derelict, never or rarely showing up in modern studies, or merely as quaint relics of idiosyncratic minds at best. Some, however, were towed repeatedly into notoriety only to get maligned and ridiculed, even despite prima facie plausibility. Or this very obloquy might render them worthy of a footnote and a cautionary tale about the ease of seduction or peril of superficial or hasty conclusions (and here an ironic touché!).

However, the real reason for their shameful abandonment has now been plausibly advanced as being the common lack of a systematic intuition regarding the authentic contours of the original Gospel message. Without such a generalized pervasive insight, discrete passages, even when satisfactorily expounded grammatically or syntactically, and particular words, even if accurately appraised semantically or lexically, still do not automatically divulge their original connections with the genuine ancient apostolic explanation-as-a-whole, and so eventually drop out of sight under the disfavor of domineering ideological mainstays. It may be time to resurrect these poorly embalmed historic remains, dust them off, and give them their due. If so, then the resurrectionary justice of the Father must certainly get credited in the revised annals of theological revolutions with such a culpably neglected but epochal upset play against the diabolical forces of fury and wrath that nailed His Son to the Cross on Golgotha. Yet what meters have meanwhile registered the seismic shift, and where is the elaborated paradigm that reflects it and heralds its cosmic benefits around the globe to our own frenetically wayward generation? Where are the documentarians when we need them most? Why must we still slog wearily through the misty obscurity of toxic Protestant jargon and sectarian posturing? Where, after all, is the “always reforming” (Semper Reformanda) church of celebrated…legend? [2/24/12; 7/31/25; 8/3/25]

Here I can’t resist drawing attention to the subtly yet deeply ironic title of a Festschrift in honor of the sixty-fifth birthday of a renowned Reformed scholar, then President and Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary in Escondido, CA—Always Reformed: Essays in Honor of W. Robert Godfrey, Westminster Seminary California (2010/2012). To trumpet the ascription “always ReformED” is a disgraceful declension from the progressive task of anyone who claims to be a faithful adherent to the sole ever-abiding Word of God in holy Scripture. When we recall that the Reformed tradition ceased reformING way back in 1619 with the premature closure of the Canons of Dordrecht, the irony becomes deeply disturbing, yet evidently was not…at least as matters stood in 2010, and hence now becomes a matter of profound sorrow. Weep here. For settling on “always reformed” amounts to taking pride in being always wrong, or at best, perpetually teenaged. But whereas I heartily sympathize with the vigor of youth, I hesitate to glorify the stubborn know-it-all attitude of that callow golden age, much less to cast its opinions in concrete. [8/8/25]

THE VICARIOUS SACRIFICE OF CHRIST WAS NOT PENAL

Jesus did, to be sure, suffer abuse ‘vicariously’ on our behalf—the Just One on account of the unjust multitude.  But even more surely, this vicious abuse was not at the hand of God but of Satan, the “Great Dragon” (Rev. 12:9) who wished to destroy the Son of Mankind and his seed.  God’s Chosen and Anointed One bore the humiliating crime of the Cross, instigated by the Adversary, so that his Father could openly demonstrate in the most persuasive and endearing manner conceivable the overwhelmingly overcompensating magnitude of his righteousness by rescuing Jesus from the inveterate foe of humanity and yanking his stinger out forcibly.

Viewed from this apostolic perspective, we can finally grasp clearly and fathom precisely what this ‘vicariousness’ shields us from:  not the wrath of God but the fury of Satan.

By ‘paying‘ such a ‘vicarious’ ransom to our diabolical captor, Jesus effected a de facto exchange that Satan by no means intended, but which his foolishness could not forestall:  we went free!  Hallelujah!

The exact mechanics of this liberation bear closer scrutiny.  By suffering this radically unjust abuse and death, Jesus won for us, as our divine Champion, the compensatory award (δικαιωμα) of agelong life, including the present, phenomenal down payment of that future allotment:  the promised Wholesome Spirit of Life. This charisma (χαρισμα), in all its variegated splendor (especially against the backdrop of a creation in the throes of remorseless entropy) is the empirical right of all those who by mere (!) faith are honored by a just God with the status of sons/daughters and heirs in His future Kingdom.  It is precisely this gift (δορημα) of agelong life, including its foretaste in Wholesome Spirit, that liberates us from Satan’s authority, because it both frees us from slavery via fear of death and furnishes an internal power source to resist Satan’s corrupting blandishments.

This means that the divine solution to ‘the sin problem’ (as Evangelicals are so fond of putting it) comes by way of the reversal of the death sentence against our sin, as was so fully and satisfactorily proved by the outpour of agelong life—along with its undeniable evidences, including the performance of signs, miracles, powers, and healings—-into the hearts of those who get sprinkled with the innocent blood of Christ, by faith.

Thus sinners actually, amazingly, get indemnified, and their sins get removed, erased, cleaned off, released/forgiven, by the very ‘stuff’ from which our sins alienated us—tangible life itself!  The innocent blood of the Lamb of God does everything for us!  It is God’s UNIVERSAL ANTIDOTE (literally, a remedy to ‘give in answer/response‘ or ‘counter‘ to a poison).  It solves everything redemptively:  it absolves wrongdoing; it dissolves opposition; it resolves alienation.  Within the blood of Messiah resides agelong life, salvation, justification, forgiveness, sanctification, deliverance, freedom, cleansing, erasure (of sins), peace, conciliation, ransom, and more.  This blood is figured in the water of baptismal immersion, the wine of the Lord’s Supper, and the oil of therapeutic anointing.  The living soul is “in” the blood.  Thus, by permitting the guilty shedding of his own innocent blood on our behalf, Messiah surrendered his Jewish flesh to injustice only to win it back again, glorified beyond ethnicity, along with a justly overcompensated surplus of life to give away gratuitously to whomever desires it, regardless of ethnic or national origin or any fleshly distinctions whatever that have divided human beings.

In sum, Jesus suffered the abuse of Satan’s full fury ‘vicariously’ for us so that we might escape death, thus also the fear of death, and consequently abject slavery to Satan and sin.  But did this effect an escape from God’s wrath, which burns against incorrigible sins?  The decisively unambiguous answer to this ‘burning’ (ahem) question must be “yes and no.”  No, if you mean this ‘vicarious’ fact ‘deflects’ God’s indignation away from our sins (and we must be warned against mistaking God’s delay or stay of execution for ostensive ‘deflection‘); but yes, if you mean that this ‘vicarious’ shedding of innocent blood for guilty flesh achieves removal of sin from the guilty sinner, thus removing the cause for wrath in the first place.

It is this simple distinction that accounts for the seriousness with which the early church took the Lord’s Supper.  For here they were collectively (think: Passover) feeding on the flesh and blood of the Lamb of God/Good Shepherd (!) who hereby takes away sin.  [4/10/06]

Yet for all this ‘vicarious‘ action by Messiah Jesus on our account, there is not the slightest hint of a ‘penal’ substitution.  ‘Penal substitution’ is premised on a compromised notion of God’s righteousness that imagines it appearing at the Cross, though in fact God did not show up until three days later to play His hand by ipso facto CONDEMNING THE CROSS as a horrible miscarriage of justice…in fact, an out-and-out  mortal sin! Even so, nothing that can’t be corrected by a little divine power and timely action.

This was “a secret having gotten hushed during agelong times” (Rom. 16:25), “having gotten concealed from ages and generations” (Col. 1:26) yet now unveiled for our wonderment: the incomparable wealth of glory of this secret—-Christ among us, our expectation of future glorification (Col. 1:27)—-which salvation is graciously accessible via the “obedience of faith” (Rom. 1:5, 16:26)!

Yet in this connection, there is still one more piece of the ‘puzzle’ that theologians have made out of the Atonement that, once we see how it fits, will take our breath away!

At the Cross there is not the slightest hint of ‘penal’ or ‘punitive’ action against Jesus’ enemies and killers.  This must be absorbed at full value before we can adequately appreciate Messiah’s abuse for what it really was:  SATAN’S SIN. For God all along knew who the ultimate enemy was.  Therefore, He did not go after Satan’s pawns; He was laying a trap for big game.  After all, Jesus came to save the world, not to condemn it.  These are collateral benefits of nullifying the works of Satan.

Vindictive human justice predictably would have ladled out reprisals, punitive overcompensations, penal ‘satisfactions’ as the price of the crime of the Cross.  Christ’s enemies should have ‘paid for‘ their premeditated enormity!  God should have crushed them with brimstone and incinerated them with fire from heaven!  But all in good time…

Are we disappointed?  Are we unsettled, ‘unsatisfied’ that God did not break forth with evident penal, punitive retribution to ‘fully satisfy’ His wrath on those wretches?  Isn’t it enough that He fully exposed Satan’s intended trickery and forever crushed his head, shattered his authority over Adam’s heretofore doomed offspring?  Must He also vent Himself on Satan’s wretched slaves and dupes?

What an injustice that would have been!  Petty reprisals are beyond the intentions of the Savior of the world.  Yet did we perhaps expect God, alternatively, to unleash that anger upon His own obedient Son as a ‘substitute’ somehow for not doing it to his envious, hateful, embittered enemies?  How hideous!

The work of total obedience was completely finished at the Cross; all that was now called for—all that Messiah’s absolutely innocent blood (i.e., “just soul“) was “crying out” for—-was proper avenging.  This observation necessarily implies that no avenging of any sort—especially no penal satisfaction, no punitive action whatsoever—by his Father could conceivably have been present to sully the pure, stark, stunning faithfulness, obedience, subordination, surrender—-Jesus’ filial love, openly, publicly, uniquely, exhibited on that cursed tree…of LIFE!  Accordingly, to perceive the Cross as the key to everlasting life we must see how it was indissolubly linked to the impending Resurrection that would actually—-historically—–set things right, restoring the harmony of the created universe disrupted by sin.  Once this cosmic fact is resolutely grasped, every deficient impulse to compromise the transparency of this radical criminality by imputing divine punitive, penal motives into its ordained significance will melt away in the beaming sunshine of divine love—both Son’s and Father’s—radiating Their rescuing wisdom untainted.

So, Peter Abelard was right…but only half right; he was right about the Cross but wrong in his silence about the Resurrection.  Yet even if he did have that detail wrong (or out of view), Anselm was no less wrong.  For although he would surely have sensed Abelard’s explanation to be incomplete, yet he himself presumed to add words without knowledge and ventured far beyond the apostolic pattern of sound explanations.  (This, at least, Abelard did not dare to do at this point.)  Yet both suffered virtual blindness about the justifying significance of the Messiah’s resurrection.  Even Paul Peter Waldenström, who perhaps came closer than most writers since the early Ante-Nicene church, and until the late 20th century, to understanding the nature of the Atonement, did not fully explore, expound, and secure this indispensable, and by his time still long-missing, link.

All penal, punitive theories of the Atonement are dead wrong and have proven to be deadly for far too many discerning prospects who, sadly, even tragically, took offense.  Is this the Devil’s revenge?  Is Satan making a comeback by twisting the liberating Proclamation of God’s Kingdom into a dull, incomprehensible God-dishonoring caricature—a grotesque gargoyle, ironically, in his own infernal image?  If so, then theologians have been his most amenable agents in this crafty stratagem of disinformation.  They have insinuated penal motives and punitive impulses between the virgin lines of wholesome Scripture.  They see penal satisfactions and divine wrath around the turn of every page.  Such theological rigor is akin to rigor mortis.  It reads death into the words of life!

But, sadly, there is more.  By reading penal or punitive elements into the Cross they underplay, neglect, ignore, and suppress where such elements actually did turn up on the historical stage, and by clear prophecies from both Old and New Testaments!  For Daniel the prophet as reiterated by Jesus himself in the Olivet Discourse pointed a long warning finger in the direction of 70 A.D., one generation—”this generation“!—beyond the Cross.  Exactly 40 years after their execution of their Messiah, the citizens of Jerusalem below, Jerusalem “after the flesh,” having remained stubborn to the graciousness of Jehovah Who gave them this merciful reprieve, suffered the terrors of God’s punitive, penal avenging to a degree that utterly defies polite description.  The “abomination of desolation” (Daniel 9:26-27) exhibits the wrath of God in no uncertain terms, with bold and bloody strokes!  These pathetically doomed Jews had hardened themselves to the proffered graciousness of Jehovah in Jesus, their Messiah, spanning forty years of mercy, tolerance, patience, and kindness by Israel’s God.  Their cup of wrath was now full and brimming over, recollecting, ironically, the fateful extermination of nations they themselves had started displacing some 15 centuries earlier.  When the Christians in Jerusalem beheld, even in reportedly awe-inspiring portents in the sky, what was looming, they fled in obedience to their Master’s warning a generation earlier and narrowly escaped the barely describable internecine slaughter that the imbedded Jewish reporter Flavius Josephus less squemishly recorded for the instruction of later generations.

For their murder of their own Savior Jerusalem paid with horrific suffering of brutal, merciless mutual savagery that beggars sober, much less polite, description.  Josephus is our window into this unleashing of divine retribution in his eye-witness account, The Wars of the Jews.

Yet for all that, it did not atone!  Their national destiny was irreversibly cut off.  The Covenant with Jewish Israel was over and done with, having been exhausted in the covenantal curses against her national ethnic disobedience, shockingly climaxing in their savage coup de ‘grâce’—hanging “the King of the Jews” on an inglorious gibbet for gawkers to mock, scorn, and shame.  This singular culminating crime sealed their spiraling doom. God henceforth would choose all who dare believe His ‘Emancipation Proclamation’ concerning Jesus to become “a chosen race, a ‘royal priesthood’, a ‘wholesome nation’, a procured people,” so that they “should be recounting the virtues of Him Who calls you out of darkness into His marvelous light, who once were ‘not a people’ yet are now the people God, who ‘have not enjoyed mercy’, yet now are ‘being shown mercy'” (1 Peter 2:9-10) and shall thereupon inherit allotments in His impending kingdom.  And in this way—that is, standing in faith (Rom. 11:20,23)—shall all Israel, that is, “true Israel” who do not remain stubborn to the Son be likewise saved and equally grafted and incorporated into the one body of Messiah.

Here, then, was authentic and well-deserved penal recompense, yes, divine avenging; yet ‘satisfaction’ scarcely covers the goods. Where does wholesome Scripture so much as allude to such outpourings of righteous indignation as ‘satisfying‘ to God, (i.e., as ‘paying off’ an accumulated debt of sin)?  Such tragedies are only cause for mourning, for the staggering losses seem irreversible.   “The indignation of God is getting revealed from heaven on all irreverence and injustice of humans who are retaining the truth in injustice“ (Rom. 1:18), as was pre-eminently the dubious state of highest spiritual privilege from which the ancient nation of Israel so ignominiously, shatteringly plummeted.  It may be mercifully delayed, yet not averted from stubbornly unrepentant sinners.

What certainly did ‘satisfy’ God was His Son’s obedience regardless of the torments inflicted by the ones his love sent him to save. Satan was remorseless and hopeless, so will suffer for the ages of the ages the torments of the Lake of Fire.  Human beings who refuse to accept God’s appointed means for getting rid of their sins will also be tormented commensurate with their sins and be ultimately consumed by the fires of judgment.  This is no small loss.  Some measure of it can be gauged by the “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 8:12; 13:42,50; 22:13; 24:51; 25:30; Luke 13:28) that attends the contemplation, while in the Unseen, of their own final extermination in light of what they might have gained—–agelong joy, life, glory, and rule over a new earth where no injustice will exist to diminish happiness.  What a loss!  What a destruction!  Yet HOW GREAT A SALVATION is awaiting those who keep on trusting and obeying!  [4/11/06]