New-Testament and early-Christian alternatives to select features of Augustinian and Calvinistic soteriology

There’s no such thing as “the sovereignty of God,” there’s simply GOD, Whose Kingdom transcends the limitations of exclusively deterministic causality, and Whose Son He appointed Sovereign of all creation.

There’s no such thing as divine “predestination,” there’s simply a divine destiny, and it’s conditional on our reception, by faith, of the regenerative power of the Gospel report about Jesus Christ.

There’s no such thing as “original sin,” there’s simply sin, and it’s neither inherited nor imputed to successive generations, although its effects do proliferate diverse evils throughout the world and through time.

There’s no such thing as “total depravity,” there’s simply physical depravity, but it cannot nullify the power of the Gospel record about Jesus to engender faith within the hearts of its sinful hearers.

There’s no such thing as “unconditional election,” there’s simply election, and it’s entirely conditional on human faith, which perfectly comports with divine grace and is caused by hearing the Gospel narrative concerning God’s Elect One, the Lord Jesus, if not sinfully resisted.

There’s no such thing as “limited atonement,” there’s simply atonement, and it equates to indemnification from sin on behalf of the whole human world without exception, accessible by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

There’s no such thing as “irresistible grace,” there’s simply grace, and it’s just as resistible as the Holy Spirit and Word of God are.

There’s no such thing as “sovereign grace,” there’s simply grace, which is endlessly available to all who simply believe, and only so long as they believe, the explanation of the Gospel about the Sovereign Lord Jesus.

There’s no such thing as “common grace” or “special grace,” there’s simply grace, and it’s exclusively experiencable by voluntary faith in the Gospel account about Christ the Savior, if we don’t harden our hearts against it. The creation is sustained by, and hence testifies eloquently to, God’s love and goodness and faithfulness, which we enjoy in common with all our fellow mortal sinners regardless of faith in Christ.

There’s no such thing as “perseverance of the saints,” there’s simply perseverance, which is sustained by the faith-generating power of the Gospel story of Jesus, which brings, in turn, the sanctifying indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

There’s no such thing as “eternal conscious punishment” for disbelieving human beings, there’s simply eternal punishment, which amounts to final extermination of both body and soul in a lake of fire (gehenna). (Satan and his sinning messengers, however, do suffer agelong conscious torment.)

Every qualifier is a minimizer, a limiter, an impoverisher. Let’s be done once and for all with Calvinistic soteriology, along with its varied toxic fragments within other Protestant traditions, and which radically debases so many essential concepts of Holy Scripture. [2/6/11;10/9-10/23]

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]

77 Questions about the Atonement (Q&A #36)

36.     Didn’t Jesus pay the penalty for our sins so that we wouldn’t have to pay it?

That misses the point.  He died and rose again to take away sin itself, along with the mortal decay and fear of death that fuel it, thus halting sin in its tracks.  He died so that we might be raised from the grave to bodily immortality and corresponding wholesomeness, just like him, in order to inherit the new earth to come.  Accordingly, if we are raised together with him by baptism—“the first resurrection”—we won’t experience “the second death”—the Lake of Fire.  To be sure, Jesus bore even far more than sin’s bare ultimate consequence, death; he was hideously disfigured, abused beyond recognition, mocked, defamed, you name it.  Yet regardless of all Christ’s personal suffering of abuse, all others who die are ipso facto still bearing that lethal consequence of sin; evidently God’s intention for Christ’s work was not to pre-empt that natural result, but was holding out for a more encompassing and satisfying (though more diatant) outcome by far.  Touché.

Jesus’ Resurrection Unmasked Official Corruption While Glorifying His Lordship

We might have expected the chief priests of Israel to fall on their faces repentantly in sackcloth and ashes after learning the News from the Roman detail appointed to secure the tomb where Jesus was laid, to the effect that superhuman beings had appeared and raided the tomb in open defiance of Roman law and might, while the crucified corpse walked out alive in shattering light!  Why in Heaven’s name didn’t those chief priests instantly collapse, reduced to remorse and anguish, mourning the staggering revelation that, after all, they had indeed murdered their own Messiah!  (Lk. 27:62-66, 28:11-15)  For now they knew without question that God Himself and not mere human power had sprung their death trap!  Or did they not recognize the truth because their concept of Israel’s God was so mangled that they fully expected if Jesus were actually the Messiah, then God’s vengeance upon them would surely have been wreaked in some more obviously destructive way than “merely” by resurrecting their victim?  In other words, did such mercy seem so inconceivable an attribute of the God they thought they were worshipping that they completely mistook his real identity and character when he actually did “bare his mighty arm” and, lo!, superabundant, overwhelming favor materialized before their eyes?  Something on this order, it seems to me, must be invoked to explain their incorrigible blindness and recalcitrant viciousness.  They got calloused by degrees until they were, at length, casehardened against the most stupendous sign God ever gave Israel!  [11/30/97]

Christ Jesus, the risen Lord, gives time a new lease on life.  Rather than eclipsing time by the advent of a mythical “eternity” (aidiotes), a word appearing in neither the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint–much less in the Hebrew!) or the New Testament, God’s Messiah liberates His creation from the signs of decay by which we commonly mark time’s effects on created things.  It is time cleansed of corruption that will characterize the impending ages of the cosmos.  [12/21/97]

Tongues of fire at Pentecost are symbolic of God’s witness to faith as an “acceptable sacrifice,” as in many O.T. instances of fire falling from heaven to consume a sacrifice offered in faith.  That coming–“falling“!–of the Holy Spirit was God’s own testimony to the acceptability of trust in Jesus as Jehovah’s Salvation.  [01/15/98]

The difference between the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead and the resurrection of others mentioned in Scripture (the son of the widow of Nain in Elisha’s day, the servant of the centurion, the widow’s son, Lazarus, the resurrections of some saints after Jesus’ Resurrection, et al) is that Jesus’ own was followed by glorification at his ascension, while that of the others was not.  So we should distinguish these events carefully.  At the “general” resurrection to come, before Messiah’s judgment of all nations, Scripture seems to indicate that none are glorified.  But after the Judgment the lost will be thrown into the Lake of Fire and the saved will be glorified for agelong life.  [01/31/98]