Protestant Reformation-era sectarian animosities and credal absolutism have so polarized the church and paralyzed doctrinal progress that many salutary breakthroughs continue to be sidetracked and forgotten, to our detriment.

The Lord’s Supper, our nourishing communion in his death via crucifixion (his body, given for us—the bread of his flesh) until he comes back again alive via resurrection (his lifeblood, shed for us—the wine of his Spirit) [2/10/11], finds its complement in our cleansing baptism, wherein we are “buried“as mortally decaying fleshly bodies, but then “raised” as vitalizingly wholesome spiritual bodies. [11/30/23]

During the 17th century, the smoky accusation “Socinian!” was not seldom blown in the face of those who dared challenge the systematic purity of mainline Protestant doctrine and its affiliated orthodox traditions at any point. Any who dared profess an urge to go beyond the Reformers in faithfulness to Scripture might fall under suspicion, reproach, and danger of life and limb. This undeniable and now properly embarrasing fact should give us pause before accepting all the pretensions of the dominant and now verifiably compromised dogmatists of the Protestant Reformation and subsequent eras.

Satan’s strategy was evidently to stall Biblical progress on every front, not merely on those topics where Socinians (so-called, since the Polish Brethren among whom this penetrating Italian theologian took up permanent residence had long held similar unitarian opinions before he came along to help render their convictions more thoroughly and systematically defensible according to Scripture) happened to differ from the mainline traditions. For centuries thereafter, in fact right down to the present, the charge of “Socinian” has blackened many an attempt to “get it right” on various doctrinal matters and has sounded the death knell to potential advances. Corrupt, half-baked human traditions have trumped the very Word of God Himself, to the substantial loss of God’s kingdom. Many a worthy insight hereby became prematurely discredited on the slightest pretext lest the challenge distract busy theologians from their professional routines. [2/10/11]

Under the deleterious punitive sway of John Calvin’s novel dogma of “penal substitution” the English Puritan movement became bitterly denunciatory and vigorously persecutorial as pet doctrines became set in stone via the Westminster Confession and Catechisms. Yet in spite of the sufferings they inflicted, dissenters veritably frothed forth fresh insights and biblical clarifications at the risk of reputation, livelihood, life, and limb. Their writings were hunted down and delivered up to fire with devilish determination and pious glee. They were routinely and deceptively labeled and assailed with stock anathemas to deter curious truth-seekers from daring to affirm them or trying to procure the allegedly deviant publications and further spread their leaven. [2/17/11]

William Pynchon (1590-1662) may have been the first person in modern times (1655) to articulate the apostolic teaching concerning “the righteousness of God” being identical to God’s own personal uprightness instead of Christ’s, and, moreover, in a positively rewarding sense rather than a negatively retributive one. Yet it was not until some nine decades later (1741, An Essay on Redemption, Being the Second Part of a Tract, intitled, Divine Rectitude) that John Balguy first coined an appropriate term for that idea: ”premial,” albeit he employed it only twice in that graceful treatise and indicates no awareness of his predecessor William Pynchon’s kindred advances. [2/17/11]

Closed-system, zero-sum mundane economics and commercial finance cannot comprehend either the ex nihilo wealth-creation that exclusively accounts for the vast super-compensation rendered to the Lord Jesus Christ by the Creator for bearing outrageous injustices, nor can it fathom the gratuitous giveaway program of welfare to unworthy sinners that came in its wake. PENAL SATISFACTION is thus perpetually at cross-purposes with PREMIAL RESTITUTION.

Perhaps the central ‘gratifying’ or ‘satisfying’ feature of penal substitution is the sense that a certain ‘number’ or ‘quantity’ of sins can be ‘completely paid for,’ thus supplying a kind of ‘closure’ to the system, also psychologically. Everything seems ‘symmetrical’ and ‘clinched.’ But this is illusory. In fact, it creates a false security that, in practice, actually compromises a dynamic, vital, covenantal relationship with the living God. The ethical results of such an impersonal—even mechanical or automatic—schema are often appallingly dis–grace-ful. False security can breed conceit and arrogance, clannishness and sectarianism.

The inner certainty and spiritual assurance we crave as fragile mortals are founded on the solid proof of God’s graciousness in spite of any ‘amount’ of sin. That proof has been granted in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ from a crucifixion by vicious sinners who were thereby spared immediate, well-deserved termination.

However, when the authentic original interpretation of the ‘Crossurrection‘ composite of integrally linked events comes to be denatured into a penal event followed by a mere resurrection rubber-stamp, then the full impact of those tandem Messianic events is debased and disempowered from delivering its intended full redemptive payload and veers off its divine trajectory. But properly understood and proclaimed, the ‘Crossurrection‘ trumps any other conceivable method or means of providing confident assurance of God’s gracious acceptance, and all without breeding unbefitting presumptuousness. This is because God deliberately made sure there were plenty of qualified, diverse, and independent eyewitnesses to both of its key historic components as well as to Jesus’ career of powerful miraculous deeds, peerless ethical instruction, and prophetic fulfillments in startling sync with literally scores of ancient prophecies recorded in Israel’s ancient Scriptures.

For the same reason, any talk of ‘merits‘ here is unbiblical—a vain attempt to ‘compute’ a conjectured economic exchange rate between sins and pardons. All such recourses are carnal calculations with deceptive utility and positive harm. Such fundamental departures from native biblical vocabulary and conceptuality are shoals easily avoidable by prioritizing concordant analysis of recurrent biblical patterns of usage, whether of words, numbers, names, metaphors, themes, or even whole narrative episodes. [2/6/11; 10/11/23]

In addition to the eyewitness testimony of the disciples of Jesus to his career, crucifixion, and resurrected existence, the miracle-working testimony of the Holy Spirit ever since Pentecost may be added to those weighty considerations that establish God’s extraordinary graciousness and forgiveness, and which far surpass the deceptive grounds of ‘penal substitution,’ i.e., a conjectured ‘penal satisfaction of God’s penal justice‘ by Christ, which is but quicksand.

Lutheranism, Calvinism, Arminianism (at least in the form of its influential but idiosyncratic articulation by Hugo Grotius), and Amyraldianism, each in varying degree, suffer under the imaginary burden of establishing a surer ‘economic’ basis for God’s amazing grace than the unalterable written witness of the New Testament conjoined with the continuous experiential witness of the Holy Spirit. [2/8/11; 10/12/23]

By the Cross, Satan imagined that he had successfully stamped out his rival for rule of planet earth along with his miraculous restorative powers. But it so happens that these creation-restoring powers of the Holy Spirit bequeathed to Jesus as Messiah were his right, due to his lifelong maturing obedience to God his Father. Therefore, when Jesus was deprived of his life, including those powers that were his property and rightful possession, Satan committed a criminal act deserving, by the rules of divine justice, DUE COMPENSATION, which, in this unexpectedly exceptional case, just so happened to be ABSOLUTELY OVERWHELMING! And it is this unparalleled supercompensation that Christ personally bequeaths to us as a pure gift—immersion in the Holy Spirit of unquenchable life. Without Christ’s brutal experience of abuse unto death, this compensation would never even have existed for us, because never called into existence by the exigencies of reparative justice to him. Praise God from Whom such Blessings flow!

This peculiar feature of divine justice—supercompensation—may also account for the necessity (in view of God’s intended outcome of salvation for ALL who trust Him) of His Son’s even suffering a curse of the Law of Moses (which God Himself had stipulated, of course) as well as temporary abandonment at the cross. For THESE EVILS (although by no means to be construed as ‘divine punishments’ administered substitutionarily on behalf of sin/sinners who all ‘deserved’ them), WOULD LIKEWISE NEED TO BE JUSTLY SUPERCOMPENSATED BY GOD. And such compensation would constitute proof that those particular abuses were not ‘signs of God’s wrath’ but definitive precursors, even beneficent enhancements, of His impending justly due GRACIOUSNESS, indeed, His very SPIRIT OF GRACIOUSNESS! [2/8/11; 10/12/23]

Generally speaking, an “atoning” deed is whatever may be deemed necessary to bring peace in a particular circumstance of hostility or grievance. It ‘makes everything alright,’ relatively speaking. It induces conciliation and friendly relations between contending parties by joint agreement. However, the Atonement that God pre-planned far surpassed the limitations and relativity of the countless cultural conventions for achieving nominal interpersonal amity post-conflict. For God’s own method, at last, satisfactorily tackled “the Last Enemy,” Death itself, which hovers menacingly behind every terrestrial animosity and injury. (See, for example, Don Richardson’s noteworthy account in his famous book, Peace Child.) [2/8/11; 10/12/23]