“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 Premial Atonement 