The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Saved from wrath

Dick,

It is funny you mention Van Til. I am a member of the Presbyterian denomination that he and his colleagues started around the same time they left Princeton and to found WTS.

In this circle, Van Til is viewed as one of the (if not “the”) greatest minds of the 20th century. If one is not Van Tillian, it is best he keep it to himself! :astonished: Especially, don’t say you agree with Clarke! :smiley:

Why would it be a payment to the devil? What claim does he have? Are our sins a violation of the law of God, or of the law of the devil?

That is why the ransom theory makes no sense to me. We have violated the law of God. Also, the declaration concerning justification is made by God, not the devil.

Eternal/Endless Conscious Torment

One more thing concerning Penal Substitution (Satisfaction Theory) -

It is intricately connected to the doctrines of Original Sin, the Covenant of Works in Adam, the Covenant of Grace (Pactum salutis), the Imputation of the Active and Passive Obedience of Christ, etc…

It would take an uprooting of 20 years of my presuppositions for me to consider questioning Penal Substitution. I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon.

This is along the same lines that Jason was saying when he said:

This makes sense. Thank you.

Excellent. The above quote is the best thing I’ve read all day.

Hi Dan,

I kinda scanned through the thread, but didn’t have time to read it thoroughly, so apologies if I repeat things others have said …

Yes

Yes, no matter how one construes the workings of atonement, the death of Christ is powerful enough to draw in all – as He says in John 12: “If I am lifted up I will draw all to myself.”

But, as you say, it is evident that not all men are in Christ, that judgment and punishment are coming for those who are not in Him.

This is an apparent contradiction, and is usually resolved by deciding that “all” doesn’t mean “each individual.”

The way I understand this is by applying the principle we see often in scripture, where something is declared in such a way that we might think it was complete, yet it is still in progress.

Here’s a passage that illustrates this:
Hbr 2:8 YOU HAVE PUT ALL THINGS IN SUBJECTION UNDER HIS FEET." For in subjecting all things to him, He left nothing that is not subject to him. But now we do not yet see all things subjected to him.

All things are subjected, but we don’t see it yet. It has been proclaimed, but is not yet realised.

This passage in 1 Corinthians 15 describes the process in greater detail:

The end is the reconciliation of all things to Him for whom they were created. (Col 1:15-20) This is an ongoing process that will be accomplished through the reign of Christ, now and into the coming ages, until God’s will is accomplished. In the meantime those who are not in Christ – those who have not yet passed from death to life – remain under the wrath and judgment of God.

And since God is Love, His wrath and judgment are both manifestations of His love. I love this little bit that shows God’s heart toward the disobedient: Jer 31:20 Is Ephraim my dear son? Is he my darling child? For as often as I speak against him, I do remember him still. Therefore my heart yearns for him; I will surely have mercy on him, declares the LORD.

Sonia

Yet we’re told we’ve been ransomed from sin. Basically, we take what we can from the metaphor and leave the rest.

Forgiveness is when the innocent party willingly suffers instead of the guilty party, in order to make reconciliation possible. The father of the prodigal son is the perfect example.

Christ, revealing the heart of God, makes this clear. His torment on the cross was the physical manifestation of the hidden torment that God has endured for our sakes from the beginning. God, the innocent party, willingly suffers for us, and always has. In love, He does not demand we repay. We cannot repay. By willingly taking our sins into himself, by taking the loss, he makes reconciliation possible. To me, this is pure glory.

But the usual understanding of PSA goes something like this:

The Judge addresses a murderer. “I find you guilty. The sentence is death by torture. But because I am a merciful man, I will torture my son to death instead, and let you go free. Now go! Be good. And tell everyone how wonderful I am.”

This isn’t divine. It’s crazy.

Hi, Dan

Thanks for your graciousness. And I thought you were responding rather mildly considering what you probably thought I had meant.

It is a journey. I went from ECT to Anni (annihilation) to Kath (as Jason calls it – I forget why – EU, UR, whatever). When I had been EU for several months it occurred to me there was something wrong with the whole PS thing as it related to UR. I couldn’t quite put a finger on it, but there were some logical inconsistencies; I could feel them. No one expects you to swim right into the scariest part of the bay – certainly not at first. The way I got into this: I asked Father to show me anything in my ideas of Him that was wrong. I told Him I would believe anything He could prove to me from scripture. Boy was I surprised – good surprised, but still it was quite a shock. I understand your reluctance to move too fast. Let the Holy Spirit take you on this exploration at His own pace.

Blessings, Cindy

Btw, I call it “Kath” because “katholic” means “universal” (and I wanted a nifty-sounding abbreviation like Calv and Arm :sunglasses: ), but I don’t want to confuse it with Roman Catholicism or Eastern Catholicism/Orthodoxy (since those are much more detailed particular branches of the church and neither one officially advocates universalism. Although they respected it for several centuries and seem to be coming back around that way now.)

It doesn’t help that the term there is usually misunderstood (as Cindy probably knows already). The wage being talked about there is a Greco-Roman term for a daily pittance provided by law to keep slaves alive: the wage sin pays out grudgingly every day is death. Paul is contrasting this to the free and superabundant life from God.

There are other verses about God paying sin with death, but this isn’t one of them. Yet even the classic example of Psalm 62:11-12, where David seems to finally come to understand what punishment from God is about, uses the verb {shawlam} when talking of God shawlam-ing a man according to his work.

King David finishes his warning against oppression, and his hope of God’s refuge from treachery, with the revelation,

"One thing God has spoken;
"These two things I heard:
"That power belongs to God
"and lovingkindness is Yours, O Lord!
“For You {shawlam} a man according to his work!”

Power and lovingkindness are the same thing in God (according to the revelation), so power expressed in punishment of sin must still be lovingkindness toward the person being punished.

Notably, the verb {shawlam} supports this: it’s a primitive word meaning ‘to make safe’, related to the word for peace, and involving by metaphorical application several actions with beneficial intentions and goals for the one being acted toward, such as fairly paying, completing, saving, being friendly, making amends, to perfect, to make good, to make prosper, to make a peace treaty.

The daily pittance sin pays is death; but God shawlams a man with power and lovingkindness. (Not that David had an easy time getting that; he tended to hope it for himself, but not for his enemies. The Son of David, being David’s Lord, does better than David.)

There are definite points in favor of some kind of penal atonement theory, with the Son suffering along with sinners, and even with the Son dying instead of sinners; but the standard PSA models where the Father is angry and needs to punish someone so the Son volunteers to be the victim of the punishment and in return the Father agrees to let the guilty go free, is not in the least coherent with trinitarian theology. Nor is the idea that justice is primarily about wrath and punishment and hurting other people. I rejected that long before I was ever a Christian universalist. Justice is primarily about fulfilling fair-togetherness between persons (what the scriptures in Greek call {dikaiosune}), which is what happens in and as the Trinity as the one and only substantial self-existent ground of all reality. Love and justice are basically the same thing, the action and the result of the action. We’re expected to become just (not in a legal fiction of being righteous, but actually righteous), and once evil is done away with we will live in justice with one another not injustice. That couldn’t possibly mean we’re in punitive wrath (or any other kind of wrath) against each other ever after!

Regarding Hebrews 9 (from notes I’ve been working up for the Exegetical Commentary project): the Hebraist is about how previous high priests, even if they kept off judgment for the people by sacrificing something other than themselves, still were mortal and died. By contrast, Christ sacrifices Himself to put the covenant of salvation in effect, since a covenant is never in force while the one who made it lives but is valid only when the one who makes it dies (9:16-17)–which is why those who could not live after dying sacrificed other lives belonging to them in representation of themselves. And yet Christ lives eternally to put that covenant of salvation in effect: a covenant God makes with Israel, which Israel is supposed to keep, but which the Son (acting as the perfect Israel, the perfect prince of God) perfectly keeps and puts into effect.

And what is the covenant that Christ puts into effect by dying and yet living? The Hebraist talks about it at 10:16, quoting Jer 31:33, “This is the covenant that I will make with them, after those days, says YHWH” (referring to the days of Israel’s punishment for her sins and the coming Day of the Lord). “I will put My laws upon their heart, and upon their mind I will write them. And their sins and their rebellions I will remember no more.” “Now where there is forgiveness of these things,” comments the Hebraist, “there is no longer an offering for sin.”

If the Father and the Son do not keep acting in solidarity with that covenant They have made with each other, as a promissory to the covenant YHWH will eventually make with penitent Israel after their days of punishment, then They are breaking covenant with each other, which would put Them on par with sinners who break their covenants with God. A mere static establishment isn’t enough, just like a promise to keep the covenant isn’t enough for a human: They have to perform, and to keep performing. And the Hebraist emphasizes that this covenant which will be made by God with penitent and previously punished Israel in the Day of the Lord to come, was first put into true and perfect effect as a covenant between Son and Father with the death of Christ (the Son being faithful unto death for the Father, and the Father being faithful beyond death for the Son).

To cease seeking, or never to seek, to bring about salvation of sinners from sin, would be for the Persons of God to break covenant with each other on that topic, too.

(This has some strong relation to the Abrahamic covenant of Genesis 18, discussed by Paul in Galatians; I just got finished writing an extensive article talking about this toward the end, over at the Cadre Journal, in connection with the question of how far the ontology of supernaturalistic theism means that God is authoritatively responsible for my sin. I’m convinced this is the key to the notion of Christ dying in place of sinners, not only along with sinners in sharing the penalty. But wrath of the Father against the Son has nothing to do with it.)

This is the heart of the gospel: Justification on the merits of the finished work of Jesus Christ.

God made a covenant with Adam (and all his posterity in him). Adam disobeyed and brought condemnation on himself and all his posterity (Rom 5:12).

God made a covenant with Jesus Christ, the second Adam (Rom 5:18,19). Reconciliation requires that the penal sanctions of the disobedience of Adam and all his posterity be fully expiated and a perfect righteousness imputed.

It is through covenant union to Jesus Christ that we are justified.

Please expand on why you believe the Pactum salutis is inconsistent with trinitarian theology.

Justification is a legal declaration. It is the opposite of condemnation. By justification one is declared righteous. For the sinner to be justified requires that his sins be expiated and that he have a perfect righteousness. Jesus Christ fully expiated the sins of those connected to him in his death (this is referred to as the passive obedience of Christ) and his perfect obedience is imputed to all who are in union with him (this is referred to as the passive obedience of Christ). It is on the merits of the active and passive obedience of Christ that God justifies us.

First, the work of Jesus Christ is no legal fiction. He obeyed and his obedience is perfect righteousness.

Second, you are mixing justification with sanctification. We do not become just, we are declared just. We become righteous through sanctification. Justification is on the merits of alien righteousness; sanctification is the work of the Spirit within us. He regenerates us and enables us to grow by the means of grace (word, sacrament and prayer). We cooperate in the process of sanctification by availing ourselves to the means of grace. Sanctification results in the fruits of obedience.

With this I am coming to agree. That is why I am here.

The only difference I’d make in the above is that a “testament” is valid only when the one who makes it dies.

This was a gradual process for me too. My first concern was to decide if Scripture taught that all would be reconciled. Then as that assurance began to settle in, I started to find that other things I had assumed were true didn’t seem to fit any more.

It’s not the work of Christ that is a legal fiction, it is the “imputation” of that righteous to sinners that creates the legal fiction. God does not justify the wicked.

Sonia

Then we have no hope. The declaration of Romans 3:11 “There is none righteous” condemns us all.

Hi 1824 :slight_smile:

Well it’s been a long time since I rock and rolled :laughing: ; but I do remember there was quite a lot of furious ill feeling between Clark and Van Til – and their respective followers -over the different weight given to persuppositional arguments in Christian apologetics (or something like that).

In my view, one of the problems with the Van Tils of this world is they are very isolated from the thinking of other theologians and Christian traditions. It’s not only the fault of van Til and his ilk mind you–other Christians haven’t engaged properly with his arguments to sift them for what has some worth and what does not, and to see how he fits into a bigger story. He’s been largely ignored outside of his circle. It’s always a joy to see a top notch mainstream theologian like Gary Dorrien paying really close attention to van Til as he does in ‘The Remaking of Evangelical Theology – a book that I greatly enjoyed.

Blessings (and listen to your heart as well as your head – the heart sometimes makes leaps that the head takes many years to catch up with. The space given for mystery in other forms of Christianity allows for this, and celebrates this. You’ll be fine :slight_smile:

I wouldn’t go so far as to say one needs to reject Satisfaction theory, only that it is an incomplete understanding, as are most atonement theories by themselves.

The prodigal son was set free from his legal obligations to his father by faith in the finished work of the innocent party (his father) who graciously and willingly suffered in his place. Having been justified, he now will be sanctified by active and willing participation in the loving spirit that unites the members of the household.

But how helpful is this sort of language?

In plain English:

The father says, “You’ve come home!”

The son says, “Look what I’ve done. I’m so sorry for hurting you…”

The father says, “That’s all in the past. It’s done and dusted. Forgotten. We’ll begin afresh! Tomorrow’s a new day!”

The son says, “Yes. Tomorrow will be a new day.”

I wonder if our disagreement is just in the way we’re saying it? I’ll try to describe better what I mean, and you can tell me what you think.

True – on our own we have no hope. I don’t mean to say that we can make ourselves righteous. As Paul says, “who shall deliver me from this body of death?” We are unable.

We are slaves to sin, and Master Sin rewards his slaves with death. But thanks be to God, we have a Savior who comes to set us free.

When I said that God does not justify the wicked, I meant in in the sense we see here:
Exd 23:7 Keep yourself far from a false matter; do not kill the innocent and righteous. For I will not justify the wicked.
Pro 17:15 He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the LORD.

That is that God does not approve of judging a wicked person “innocent” nor will He do what is an abomination to Him.

God will not call a wicked or ungodly person “just” while they remain dead in sin – He justifies the sinner only by making him actually just/righteous.

Jn 8:34ff Jesus answered them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.

He sets us free indeed, thus we can be righteous indeed.

The first definition of δικαιόω (justify) here is “set right.”

I believe that is what God does when he justifies sinners – He sets them right, and the beginning of that righteousness is faith. (Perhaps you would call this “regeneration”?)

So when it says that Abraham’s faith was counted or credited to him as righteousness, it was because faith really is righteousness.

I hope that clarifies my view a bit. (And let me add, I consider my understanding of this, and all things, a work in progress – I’m a student, not a teacher.)

Sonia

Wild discussion here… but a little too theological for me :laughing:

And I’m one of those more ‘liberal’ folks (though I’m not sure how one would define liberal or conservative when it comes to one’s beliefs… one man’s liberal may be another man’s conservative, and vice versa :wink:) that likes to hang around here 'cuz it’s a cool place, and the people are friendly, and not necessarily 'cuz I could comfortably take on the label of ‘evangelical’ (though I could comfortably take on the label of ‘universalist’), so I might not really fit into a discussion such as this :wink:

By the way, welcome 1824, not sure if I said hi yet :slight_smile:

I can relate to your struggle with trusting God’s character and heart, even if our backgrounds and viewpoints and ways of thinking are different. I’ve been through the ringer of fear and doubt and anger and confusion about that too.

Hang in there bro, you’re not alone, and I believe the God who is Love is with you :slight_smile:

Blessings :slight_smile:

Matt

Dan,
I finally read through this thread in detail and saw this:

Forgive me for pushing a topic you didn’t want to discuss.

It is indeed a big issue. I’ve discussed my universalism at least a little bit with several of the pastors at my church, but I have never brought up atonement issues – definitely one heresy at a time! :mrgreen:

When I first started investigating UR, it never occurred to me to question PSA – it was probably a couple of years at least before I did.

Sonia

Mikhail Hany, a Coptic Orthodox teacher explains that penal substitution is not a teaching of the historic church but came about in the middle ages in Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.

Here is the first talk in a series of 12, entitled “Divine Justice”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCjS0YvXeRc