Atonement

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RECOVERING BIBLICAL AT-ONE-MENT : M. M. M. NINAN their wrath. Sacrifices are the expressions of penitance leading to change of behavior. But God the Father presented by Jesus is the embodiment of goodness, justice, and mercy. My Father does not need a bribe to convince him to be just or merciful because he is the very definition of justice and mercy. God does not need an appeasement to forgive. “But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous... Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Math 5:44-45, 48) There are several problems with this approach if we push the metaphor too far. The answers to these problems will lead to additional metaphoric explanations and understanding of the cross. This idea is not new. Scot McKnight in his blog writes: "What I want to say is not that this theory is wrong... I want to say is that the atonement is so much more than this. And, if it is so much more than this, then it follows that using “penal substitution” as our guiding term is inadequate and misleads others. At the least, it does not provide enough information to explain what one really believes occurs in the <strong>Atonement</strong>" This brought about strong criticism by the end of the sixteenth century this interpretation of atonement came under severe criticism by Pelagian, Faustus Socinus, and others. The Reformers saw Jesus as undergoing vicarious punishment (poena) to meet the claims on us of God’s holy law and wrath (i.e. his punitive justice). What Socinus did was to arraign this idea as irrational, incoherent, immoral and impossible. 68
RECOVERING BIBLICAL AT-ONE-MENT : M. M. M. NINAN Giving pardon, he argued, does not square with taking satisfaction, nor does the transferring of punishment from the guilty to the innocent square with justice; nor is the temporary death of one a true substitute for the eternal death of many; and a perfect substitutionary satisfaction, could such a thing be, would necessarily confer on us unlimited permission to continua in sin. 1. The problem of innocence. .The immediate reaction of any sane person will be that that is not justice, but injustice. Putting one innocent person in place of a criminal is not satisfaction of justice. The principle of substitution is not justice at all; it is actually a denial of justice specially when it come to life.. “It seems not to emphasize God’s justice but to rest on a denial of it. For all the talk of debt is really a metaphor. What PST is in fact telling us is that any human being’s sins are so great that it is a violation of justice not to punish that person with damnation. What God does in response, however, is to punish not the sinner but a perfectly innocent person instead (a person who, even on the doctrine of the Trinity, is not the same person as God the Father, who does the punishing). But how is this just? Suppose that a mother with two sons, one innocent and one disobedient, inflicted all her disobedient son’s justly deserved punishment on her innocent son, on the grounds that the disobedient one was too little to bear his punishment and her justice required her to punish someone. We would not praise her justice, but rather condemn her as barbaric, even if the innocent son had assented to this procedure. If the mother could after all forego punishing the disobedient son, why did she not just do so without inflicting suffering on the other child? And how is justice served by punishing a completely innocent person” Eleonore Stump (p. 428)? "Now, if a man murdereth, behold will our law, which is just, take the life of his brother?"(Alma 34:11) (The Book of Alma is one of the books that make up the Book of Mormon. The full title is The Book of Alma: The Son of 69
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Atonement

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