The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Excellent critique of PSA

I have attached this very excellent critique of PSA from a chap I bumped into on Jesus Creed who was saying some very intelligent things about the Atonement. There were a very few statements he made in the course of making his arguments that I wasn’t sure that I agreed with, but these were somewhat tangential to his actual arguments, which I thought were well thought-out/ articulated and clearly presented. I have noted in the document itself those locations by either bolding and/ or adding a question mark to the end of the statements I questioned.

I am actually quite surprised he is not a universalist, but he does at least hold out some hope of the possibility of post-mortem repentance and salvation (though he does not go into this in the article).

This is an excellent read, and worth the time to sit down and read its 13 pages on why the Scripture presents a Restitution vs. a Retributive model of Atonement.
Restitution and Atonement, by Gabriel Renfro.docx (48.5 KB)

Excellent article, thanks for the link. A very thoughtful critique.

The author is perhaps from the Reformed mindset? I say this because, searching the text for the word ‘love’ (an Achilles’ heel for many reformed positions) brought up some strange, to my mind, statements - and I noticed you had placed ? marks after some of the as well, such as:

"The Atonement is the event in which God’s Trinitarian love for God… (?)

"The glory of God is in the love for Himself that exists within the Trinity. (?)

That is really a mixed-up, weird thought; or I’m really missing something here.

But as I said, for a Reformed presentation of the restitution model, very well done.

You nailed it.
He is Reformed in (some of) his thinking which is where you correctly guessed I took issue when that clearly popped out in the paper. The two trinitarian statements particularly; not because of their “tinitarianity” per se, but because…well, yeah. Really mixed-up weird thought, as you said.