“Value” the justice of eonian punishment???
What many people don’t realize (and I didn’t either until I ran across some weird things while studying this verse a while back) is that this is one of those words that isn’t at all entirely clear what it means. Now, I’m not an expert in Greek (at all), so I have to depend heavily on people who are experts in Greek, most of whom are not universalists by the way; but sometimes when digging around I find evidence that ideological context is dictating translation instead of exegetical context dictating ideology (for want of a better word). This is one of those times.
The word is {tisousin}. Everyone (so far as I can tell) agrees it’s a third person plural verb form indicating future action by the doer of the verb; and everyone seems to agree it is derived either from {tino} or from a rare alternate emphatic form {tio}; but there’s some debate about which of those it’s derived from.
The problem is that {tino} means to pay in the sense of valuing or honoring. A slightly modified form of it, {time}, shows up numerous times in the New Testament in several cognates. To give some examples: as the verb {timao}, which always means to honor or to value; and in an adjective form that always describes its objects as valuable; or a noun form that indicates ‘value’ as a concept. But it doesn’t mean merely to pay. The New Testament authors had an entirely different word for that, {apodidomi}.
Tino and its cognates are definitely and clearly used everywhere else in the NT (with two debatable exceptions I’ll mention in a minute) for valuing or honoring something in a positive way (unless maybe it’s phrased in a negative fashion, a’tino-something, which this word is not.) You could honor the wrong things, of course, but it’s the object that makes it wrong, not the verb. No one in their right minds would say you aren’t supposed to value or honor the justice of God!
Tio would mean to value or honor more strongly. But because {tisousin} is found only one time in the whole NT, and because that one time is here in 2 Thess 1:9, and because people don’t think on other grounds already that there is any hope for those people being wholly ruined (which the context from Saint Paul’s citation proves there is, not even counting anything else), then translators have a debate over whether this word is supposed to be derived from {tino} (which would clearly make no sense) or from {tio}–which would make even less sense but it’s very rare so who knows maybe some rare reversal-meaning-by-emphasis was attached to it (by Paul or whoever he learned it from).
Now, there are some Greek authors, who could be cited (if I looked them back up), who use the term this way along with “justice” for punishment, and those authors may or may not be thinking in terms of hopeless punishment. But Paul could just as easily be thinking something like I do when I see the word “retribution” used for hopeless punishment: real re-tributive punishment is about bringing the punished one back into loyal tribute to proper authority! (Which not incidentally is also what Paul’s scripture citation turns out to be about!)
The only other times a cognate of the word is used for punishment, are in Hebrews 10:29, {timorias} a singular noun being used as a genitive “of punishment”, and in Paul’s testimony about his oppression of the church in Acts 22:5 and 26:11, {timoreo} which literally means ‘value-lift-guard’. (The same suffix, Oreo, is used as the brand name for a popular chocolate cookie which eaters frequently value-lift, too, in order to eat or lick the crème in the center guarded by the shield of the round cookies!) Paul’s behavior fits the notion of remedial synagogue punishment testified elsewhere: in extreme but not-yet-capital cases, the Jews would punish someone, hoping the punished person would recant their sin and come back to communion with the congregation. The punishment might be to within an inch of their lives, but it wasn’t supposed to be an execution as that would defeat the intention of the punishment! (The verb is active at 26:11 where Paul is actively punishing the Christians; and passive at 22:5, where the Christians are being punished.)
The context of Hebrews 10, meanwhile, cites Deuteronomy 32, where the whole point of the vengeance of God is to vindicate His rebel people, or re-tribute them, bringing them back into tribute to Him: which He prophecies will succeed, even after the people have been so destroyed that they are “neither slave nor free” (a euphemism for total destruction).
This is important in term-usage studies, because sometimes in universalism debates the topic comes up about whether “timoria” was used for hopeless punishment in the surrounding Greco-Roman culture (contrasted to “kolasis”). Both terms are used in the New Testament, but by context “timoria” turns out to involve hopeful punishment every single time, and “kolasis” by context turns out to involve hopeful punishment at least sometimes (such as with the sheep and the baby goats!)
Keeping these things in mind, the proper translation for 2 Thess 1:9 would be nothing worse than “paying honor” to the justice of God; and any true payment of honoring would involve coming to truly value the justice of God (even if that involved punishment against one’s self). It should be kept in mind that the form of the verb indicates that the subject of the verb (those who do not know God in this case, being wholly-ruined by the Lord) shall in the future be acting the verb. They aren’t receiving the action of the verb, they are doing the verb. This is exactly why some English translations prefer “earning” or some other active verb; but the word here doesn’t mean “earning” either. It means to actively pay for something valued by the payer. But in this case what shall be payed by sinners is quite simply and literally the {diken}, or justice, specifically the justice of their own eonian whole-ruination by God. They couldn’t actively pay such justice, of course; but they could come to value it, which is not only the base meaning of the term anyway, but is also what happens eventually in the prophecy from Isaiah being referenced by Paul’s phraseology: the sinners being punished by Jehovah’s judgment are not only being cleaned from their filth and bloodshed in the fire of His judgment (washed by the spirit of judgment and the spirit of burning, as it explicitly says in Isaiah 4:4), but come to value His judgment of them.
So “value”, in context, is good way to briefly and accurately get across the meaning (even though the term itself means to pay honor, or to value something enough to pay for it.)
By the way, the rather schizophrenic fashion in which translators regard this term can be exemplified by Thayer’s lexicon for its cognate {timoria} which gives punishment only as its third meaning, the more primary meaning being “to render help” or “to assist”! That is because both meanings happen to be Biblically true in the same Biblical usages. The Greek of Prov 19:29 is another example; the term is used in context of verse 25 where scoffers reject discipline but receive it anyway so that they may eventually become wise; wise men receive discipline in order to become wiser! This is no doubt one of the scriptural injunctions for the synagogue beatings such as Saul of Tarsus gave and then had to receive later as Paul; and it has a lot of topical relevance to Heb 12, where God punishes those He loves in order to help them–even though no one likes it at the time! Thus there is also a direct lexical connection between Heb 10’s use of {timoria} in punishing the worst kinds of sinners, and Heb 12’s hopeful punishment of those whom God intends to save from sin.