CADRE Comments

Dave's Challenge is a multi-part long-ruining theme on my blog:   Remember Dave wanted me to describe Chrsitain message without using any conventional language because he consider all the Christian terminology to be worn out, to have become so often used we don't think about it anymore. I thought I did pretty well but Dave didn't think so. I'm working on the premise that granting the problem Dave finds, worn out language, the other approach we can do, besides Dave's approach (which is chucking traditional terms and re-describing) is to re-define the old terms. I said: "I've already demonstrated how one might expand upon God talk without referring to God per se." Dave answers: You've touched on the edges of how one might do so, but still firmly rooted in a heavily theological framework and philosophical perspective. There's still the issue of Christianity.  No offense to my friend Dave, who is a professional academic an...

No apologetics from me today (or probably tomorrow either). But since I do believe very much more than the little bit I chewed over at length yesterday... {g} Remember, remember, the thieves on the cross: one of them penitent, both of them lost! The Good Lord did suffer with both of those men: descending and rising to live again! JRP Holy Saturday 2012

[Note: The contents page for this series can be found here. The previous entry, Chapter 50, can be found here. ] [This entry constitutes Chapter 51.] If God is going to maintain all the various balances in His creation, while still working to His utmost to help effect our salvation from our own sins and the sins of our predecessors, then He will have to go about it within our history--not merely within the stories we tell ourselves (although He will do some work along those lines, too), but within the real natural reality we inhabit as synthetic creatures. This means He will act within a historical context, and it will be a context of His choosing: designed and guided, even 'tweaked' by Him to fit His plans; but also incorporating the choices of the people, the families, the nations, who will be a part of this particular story of history. But those people will not be sock-puppets. They will be real people; they will be fallible, even though God works with them to the best of ...

Here's an interesting article on the atonement from Time Magazine that was written in the wake of Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. The takeaway point is that Christians have always disagreed among themselves about the exact nature of the atonement, the 'divine calculus' (as the article puts it) behind Jesus' death. And when ordinary Christians affirm that Jesus 'died for our sins', they often have very different ideas implicit in that one affirmation. This is not to say that different atonement models cannot be synthesized, but it does cast doubt on the idea that there is one core understanding of the atonement that is essential to true Christian piety.

A recent defense of penal substitutionary atonement (hence PSA), Pierced for our Transgressions , attempts to establish that PSA was the dominant understanding of the atonement among the early Church Fathers, and was not just an innovation of the Reformation. However, a recent article by Derek Flood shows that the authors of PFOT use an overly broad criterion for detecting PSA in the early Fathers and lift quotations that seem to support PSA out of the broader context of the individual Fathers' soteriology. Since a commentator on Triablogue recently asserted that Athanasius actually affirms PSA when I suggested that he was a counter-example, I will reproduce some of Flood's remarks on Athanasius and Augustine. Flood first distinguishes, as I have done, between the general idea of substitutionary atonement and the more specific idea of penal substitution: Substitutionary atonement broadly speaks of Christ's death being vicarious: Christ bearing our sin, suffering, sickness,...

1. It is important to note that, while the New Testament does say that the death of Jesus was unjust, nevertheless God did act to deliberately bring it about, which is to say that men's motives for bringing about the death of Jesus were not the same as God's: “Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23) "Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief" (Isa 53:10) And yes, it is clear that the suffering and death of Jesus was something God wanted to happen, and made sure that it did happen. It is also true that God is not (necessarily) unjust in allowing or ordaining something evil to happen in order to bring about a greater good. However, what's at issue here is not whether God ordained something to happen for a greater good, but what his intentions were. Advocates of PSA assume that the purpose for which God ordained Jesus' death was to sh...

Since it is crucial that one's view of the atonement be based on Scripture and not just abstract philosophical considerations, I've decided to blog through Norman McIlwain's book in which he lays out a substitutionary, but non-penal, model of the atonement. The heart of McIlwain's thesis is that the debt we owe to God is not death, but righteousness: we all owe God a perfectly righteous life, which debt however we cannot pay because of our sinful condition. So the debt that Jesus paid in our stead was the debt of righteousness: a life offered up to God in perfect obedience, even unto death. In this post I will summarize the Scriptural evidence discussed in Chapter 1 of his online book, The Biblical Revelation of the Cross, while adding some comments and additional evidence of my own. McIlwain begins by pointing out how odd it is that while theologians have tended to see the cross as revealing the justice of God, in that Jesus bore the penalty for our sin, the New Testa...