R. T. Kendall, pastor of Westminster Chapel, London, alleged that “‘It is finished’ is the English translation of tetelestai, a colloquial expression in the ancient marketplace that meant ‘paid in full’.” I have found only one lexicon that might substantiate such a translation, Liddell & Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, p. 1772. However, this appears to be yet another case where a penal satisfaction devotee may have gotten carried away with the theory and was willing to tweak holy Scripture to make it stick. A cognate verb is used to mean “pay taxes” twice in the New Testament (Matt. 17:24, Rom. 13:6), but this seems hardly a common marketplace translation. Moreover, taxes had to be paid annually in perpetuity. Nor does the verb evidently mean “pay in full.”
*Understanding Theology, Vol. I. (Fearn, Ross-shire, U.K.: Christian Focus Publications, Geaniesttonse, 1996) 103, emphases added. [9/20/11]
We all need to learn to READ GOD’S LIPS, pay attention to God’s actual vocabulary and its recurrent uses in Scripture, not make things up as we go (like novice theologians too often, if subtly, get trained to do, alas!). [9/20/11; 12/31/24; 1/21/25]
“The Lord’s Supper mirrors both the ancient Tabernacle and Christ’s death on the Cross.
1. We do the Lord’s Supper in two parts:
(a) The Bread, symbolizing Christ’s broken body.
(b) The Cup, symbolizing Christ’s shed blood.
2. This mirrors the ancient pattern:
(a) The offering of a sacrifice.
(b) The application of the blood.“
R. T. Kendall, Understanding Theology. Vol. I. (Fearn, Ross-Shine, U.K.: Christian Focus Publications, 1996) 120. [9/20/11]
These sparkling jewels deserve to be reset in the golden framework of premial justice instead of remaining stuck in the toxic setting of leaden penal substitutes within which their dazzling worth is ingloriously downgraded and debased. [1/11/25]
“THE JUSTICE OF GOD”
“[I. Howard] Marshall writes, ‘There is something of a difference between judgment as the retribution that comes upon us repentant sinners and the judgment borne by God himself in the person of the Son through which sinners can be saved. These seem to be two rather different things, and I think that the formula of “salvation through judgment” does not adequately recognize the difference.’
“We may be on the cusp of a real disagreement here, or perhaps Marshall is thinking of something that is not clear to me. But I disagree with his statement. I believe the Bible teaches that the wrath of God that Jesus propitiated on the cross (Rom. 3:24-26) is the same wrath from which those who trust in Jesus and are justified by faith (5:1) are saved (5:9-11). So I see no difference between the judgment that will be visited ‘as the retribution that comes upon unrepentant sinners and the judgment borne by God himself in the person of the Son through which sinners can be saved.’ Believers are saved because Jesus paid their penalty, and unbelievers suffer the wrath Jesus bore. They refused God, so they pay their own penalty.“*
*James M. Hamilton, Jr., God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010) 502.
How ironic that Hamilton is yet more strident, severe, and consistent in his espousal of penal satisfaction/substitution ideology than Marshall had been during his famous public controversy with Steve Chalke and his associates a few years earlier. Perhaps there is yet another kind of justice emergent in the event—poetic. It would appear that Marshall is in a pickle and Hamilton is about to eat his lunch. Marshall correctly intuits a truth he cannot quite articulate…or dare not voice? Perhaps against his better ‘judgment’ he forfeits his case by reiterating the traditional expression: “The judgment borne by God himself in the person of the Son,” in the absence of the ‘added value’ of further clarification, although he does clearly see the disutility of the ambiguous phrase “salvation through judgment.” Marshall evidently did not apprehend that such ambiguous expressions are amenable to a profoundly clarifying and supremely defensible alternative construal: in the person of His own Son, God Himself bore the objectively visible adverse judgment from the sinners who were present at the cross (for there, most poignantly, “God was in Christ,” 2 Cor. 5:19). Yet even though this condemning of both God and His Son by Jewish and Gentile sinners was wrong—dead wrong!—God happily overturned the nefarious cabal by His own authentic judgment on the third day, namely, His mighty execution of premial justice in raising Christ from the dead. Accordingly, Jesus bore the vindictive judgment from sinners AT THE CROSS so that he could become eligible to win the countervailing vindicating judgment of God AT THE RESURRECTION! And it is solely this latter judgment “through which sinners can be saved.” Voila!
However, Hamilton is acquainted with no such judgment and no such justice. He has swallowed whole (and in turn been swallowed by) the penal and punitive interpretation of God’s judicial activity, yet he suffers debilitating blindness as to God’s premial and rewarding decrees in history—a grave professional delinquency, if I may say so. This becomes starkly clear from an examination of his citations of the famous blessing/curse lists of Leviticus 26 (pp. 74, 81,108, 155, 213, 292, 331} and Deuteronomy 28 (pp. 129, 183, 239-240, 310), where he neatly skirts over blessings (God’s covenanted promises to ancient Israel for diligent observance of the Law of Moses) while uncritically presuming curses as the univocal definition of divine judgment!
As a consequence, Hamilton indulges in a fraught polarization—the tired old dialectic of ‘justice vs. mercy,’ whereby justice gets posed as exclusively wrathful and mercy gets equated with grace. But is it not precisely this invasive dichotomy that spawned the unbiblical scenario, “justice and mercy shall kiss”?—to be sure, prominent enough in Puritan hymns, yet significantly absent from any inspired and holy Psalms themselves! (May I risk insulting my readers’ memories and intelligence by challenging circumspect doubters to refer to any analytic concordance of the Bible to locate a single instance of this spurious apposition of basic biblical vocabulary terms? Paul the apostle urged us to treasure the patterns of sound words in holy Scripture; it’s never too late to commence this exercise in ‘blowing to Kingdom come’ the delusive cover of superficial theologies and hardened creeds so that God’s children can surmount harmlessly the many snares cast before them by self-endorsed, so-called “biblical Christianity.” I may add that our growth in maturity of love and wholesomeness is on the line in our response to this rudimentary but oh-so-effectual self-discipline.)
It is telling that even though Hamilton cites and quotes from Mark Seifrid’s book plus two of his three essays in Justification and Variegated Nomism (2001), he neglects to mention Seifrid’s revolutionary findings in the second of those volumes (2004), “Paul’s Use of Righteousness Language Against Its Hellenistic Background” (pp. 39-74), which decisively establishes the Old Testament‘s uses of “justify” as restorative, rewarding, or premial. It hence appears that Hamilton may too conveniently be suppressing the full tenor of truth in Scripture and the Gospel or, more accurately (not to mention culpably), is “retaining the truth in injustice” (Rom. 1:18)—no trifling matter! For this massive treatment of his amounts to a systematic injustice to God’s Word in Scripture—Old and New Testaments alike.
When “judgment” (mishpat/krisis) and “justness” (tsedeq/dikaiosune) are comprehended in their full biblical scope, there can remain no question as to the legitimacy of Hamilton’s phrase, “salvation through judgment.” However, since Hamilton only perceives their penal manifestation and Marshall never exposes this one-sidedness forthrightly in his criticism, Hamilton might conceivably venture a comeback (notwithstanding spuriously), making Marshall look unflatteringly befuddled and inept in the bargain. The latter should have pressed him to the wall by bringing forth all the Scriptures he was neglecting to ‘marshal,’ yet Marshall, for his part, forbore to confront.
Nevertheless, this exchange between the two scholars did turn up the lingering discomfort Marshall experienced with the irresolvable equivocation that inheres in penal substitutionary doctrine: precisely how the Father actually views and visibly treats His obedient Son for the sake of our salvation, stripped of dubious imputations, mainly by Western theologians, which impugn the divine character and reflexively undermine God’s credibility before a mortally desperate humanity. [9/20/11; 1/20-21/25]
The Premial Atonement 