Zach: Whatever metaphor, the idea is that God makes one (if not "the") biggest decision for us. As far as this particular decision is concerned, we are all unfree.

Tom: If you mean the decision to create us for loving relationship, under the conditions of free will, given metaphysical constraints that (arguably) guarantee eventual universal reconciliation, and committing himself to accept these conditions as a human AND as a human experience the consequences of human failure…

...then yeah, with respect to this decision, we’re unfree. But Zach, God’s the only one around. There are no sentient creatures to FIRST get permission from and THEN create them. If this much first occur, then creating ANY sentient morally responsible beings would be impossible for God. This was part of my initial point. There’s something to your concern that human being must in some sense participate in affirming God’s choice and the terms and conditions. Namaste didn't care for this so much, but I'm still inclined to see something to it. The only possible way this can happen is for God to pledge himself (covenant with himself) to incarnate as that human and embrace creation, the whole of it, in all it was meant to be along with the consequences of all it had become. He has to be a human to do this obviously (that’s your concern). But he has to be the RIGHT human, the sort of individual who can act as a human in ways that open up possibilities for the rest of us, the whole (that's my concern).

you know, I could just ask if you're married? Have children? Did you get your children’s permission before having them and exposing them to all the risks they confront just by virtue of being human? No. We’re THEY unfree with respect to being born? Yes. Is it unjust of parents to create children under such circumstances? Obviously not.

Zach: Now if the very founding covenant with me is made without my consent, then how is the covenant legitimate?

Tom: How is our having children and committing them to the conditions and terms of human existence in this world a justified choice? But we keep having kids. Be that as it may...

As I said, ther's an important sense in which you DO consent to the covenant. Now, Namaste will disagree with this because he thinks God can unilaterally enact a covenant that involves bi-lateral risks and commitment. I’m not sure that’s possible. So I’d like to know if there’s any way an authorized human individual CAN accept the covenant on behalf of the human whole. And that’s what I think Christ does. The more I think on it, the more convinced I am that this is what Christ does.

You consent to being member of the whole by virtue of your free choice to affirm your humanity. In actualizing your self-existence by choice, especially sinful choice, you sign up as participating member of the human race and declare your choice to ‘belong’ to this whole. When you do this, you opt into the social-dispositions that govern wholes and begin contributing to it yourself. So what are you complaining about? But when you opt in, you also become eligible to be affected for good and for bad by any individual authorized to act on behalf of the whole you are a member of. It might be the CEO of a company you work for. It might be the US Congress implicating you in an act of war, the assumption of debt, the obligations of international treaties, whatever. That individuals can and do act on behalf of wholes is an indisputably established fact of human social existence. And as far as I can tell, such actions, such social realities, are the way to go in explaining Christ's atoning act on our behalf. That's essentially what we're arguing.

But wholes only act through individuals duly authorized to represent them. So what individual acted on your behalf in disarming the bondage that holds you in sin? Christ did. Only Christ could have. And Christ is authorized to act on our behalf. If he wasn't, then his act could not have implications for the whole and we'd be screwed.

Zach: Under the substitution model, God forces us (without our particular, individual consent) and then judges us based on our reaction to this forcing. This is injustice. That God takes out this injustice on himself does not resolve things, because obviously things are not resolved. If Jesus "paid it all," then why are innocent (or repentant) people still paying?

Tom: They’re not resolved on the “tit for tat debt” model of substitution, no. But that’s the problem of those who buy into that view of substitutionary atonement. I don’t. So it’s not a problem for me. I don’t think Jesus “pays the individual debts” of individual moral bank accounts. This was my problem with the “debt” version too, and I said so at the beginning of this thread.

But that’s not the only substitutionary model. Perhaps substitution is the wrong word. Perhaps “representative” would be better. Perhaps even “covenantal” atonement would work. Hey, perhaps even "Dispositional Atonement." Ooooooo. But the idea is based on the established acceptability of one acting on behalf of the whole. If such a thing EVER happens legitimately (and it does) then we’ve got a way to begin synthesizing what the Bible says about Christ acting in a way that has implications for the whole of humanity, but implications that must be individually chosen to be individually experienced and enjoyed (that's your beef). This all would only be 'unjust' if we were implicated in the effects of an act of some individual NOT authorized to act on our behalf.

The fact that people are still in despair after the ONE acted on behalf of the WHOLE to free them from despair just proves that the sort of relationship that constitutes the social disposition by which he acts is NOT a one-for-one payment of debt in the traditional penal substitution view. Something else is going on, but something that is sufficiently substitutionary to account for the one acting on behalf of the whole. That’s all. There’s not just ONE substitutionary view of atonement. Maybe that’s what’s got ya objecting. I’m not sure.

Tom

Post Edited (TGB) : 11/8/2006 7:56:30 AM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Sahid) : 11/8/2006 11:34:06 PM (GMT-6)

Zach: We both agree here on what the issue is. The way I see it:
(A) Justice requires that one party not impose on another party without consent.
(B) God's creation and subsequent holding of all people to moral accountability is an imposition without consent.

Tom: Not sure how you mean (B), but I don’t think I agree with it. There’s no problem in holding contracted parties responsible for the contracts they opt into.

Zach: I think you say that God's action in "B" is done with consent. I could be reading you wrong…

Tom: No, you’re reading me rightly. Something along those lines, yes.

Zach: …but it seems like your stance is the result of being backed into a corner.

Tom: If that’s what being consistent and open-minded is, yes.

Zach: Even though you admit, "There are no sentient creatures to FIRST get permission from and THEN create them," you nevertheless have all sentient creatures giving permission.

Tom: Yes. And I’ve explain just HOW the bilateral consequences of creation are embraced unilaterally by God.

Zach: Two problems: Permission doesn't work retroactively. God didn't know that free creatures would choose to give permission once they were created.

Tom: It doesn’t matter, Zach. That’s not how permission is gained. What’s required is not every individual’s consent so to speak. Consent can be given for the WHOLE by an INDIVIDUAL duly authorized to act on their behalf. That’s been the whole point. It’s not retroactive. It’s as good as gold given the Word of the one cutting the covenant when he says

Zach: Second, your idea of how permission is given is (to my mind) highly suspect.

Tom: I was just trying to help you along. If it doesn’t work for ya, fine. It’s not necessary to the fundamental idea of social-dispositions and the established reality that individuals can and do justly act in ways that implicate wholes.

-----------------

Tom: Did you get your children’s permission before having them and exposing them to all the risks they confront just by virtue of being human? No. We’re THEY unfree with respect to being born? Yes. Is it unjust of parents to create children under such circumstances? Obviously not.

Zach: Obviously? How in the world can you say that?

Tom: Because we universally recognize that having children is a good thing, a wonderful thing, and not an unjust or immoral thing that parents ought to be through into prison for.

Zach: Where I drastically part ways with most people is when they start using the word (or idea): "obviously."

Tom: I’ll try to remember that.

---------------------

Tom: They’re not resolved on the “tit for tat debt” model of substitution, no. But that’s the problem of those who buy into that view of substitutionary atonement. I don’t.

Zach: So how (if at all) do you see Jesus' passion to be "atoning" for sin?

Tom: If at all? Dude, where have you been? You’ve been reading my comments and still ask this? This is what this and the other “Why an Atonement?” thread are about and I’ve been pretty clear about my answer.

But Zach, bro, let’s not sweat the terminology. You believe and trust in Jesus, man. That’s what’s it about. You’re unchangeably beautiful to God and loved by him. This was demonstrated in Christ on the cross. So let’s just live in that and enjoy it. If we disagree over HOW it all works, we can still agree THAT is works, that we’re loved, and that God wants to transform us and make us a blessing to the nations. We don’t have to sweat the small print!

Peace,

Tom

Zach: I am interested in this: "Consent can be given for the WHOLE by an INDIVIDUAL duly authorized to act on their behalf."

Tom: Sounds like something a very handsome GENIUS would say!

Zach: I was stuck thinking that it must eventually boil down to full individual consent.

Tom: But we both agree that’s impossible. Individuals cannot give or refuse their parents consent to conceive and deliver them into the world.

Zach: If some do not like being part of the whole, there is no recourse.

Tom: Right. But it’s a little consequence. Even those who don’t like being part of the whole freely opt into the whole every day. The closest thing to opting out is suicide. And God ends up pursuing them as well. There’s no opting out of existence, no annihilating one’s self.

Zach: They have been forced into painful (sometimes unimaginably painful) situations against their will.

Tom: That’s why the one who can act of their behalf is hanging on a cross experiencing their despair more intensely and traumatically than any other member of the whole possibly could.

Zach: This seems unjust.

Tom: I don’t doubt that it is unjust to unnecessarily force another person into suffering.

Zach: If God or a parent does this, it still seems unjust.

Tom: God never does this, Zach. Maybe that’s part of the cause of your despair.

Zach: And its recognition as a good thing is not universal. Many regret having been born. Many despise their parents for bring them into a cruel world. I used to be one of them. I know others who felt the same way.

Tom: I used to be one of them too. But I never concluded that “having children per se” was an unjust enterprise. Life may have sucked for me. I may have regretted MY birth. But I didn’t regret everybody’s birth or “birth” per se, “existence” per se. To do that latter is some deep a** despair dude, nothing that GOD forces people into. On the contrary, it’s what he rescues people out of.

Lastly, the point of this thread I thought was to disucss how it is that Jesus' death rescues people from their JUST despair, the despair and suffering that they deserve to experience because of their sin. 

Tom

Post Edited (jefscott) : 11/12/2006 9:49:22 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (jefscott) : 11/13/2006 6:31:45 AM (GMT-6)

Zach: I deny emphatically that all the biblical writers held to the slaveholder view.

Tom: "Slaveholder" sounds yucky. Doesn't sound like anything I believe in either and I'll agree it's not biblical.

Zach: And you'll have to explain how Jesus made it clear that he "believed in the Old Testament." I personally think that he'd have to be a liar or a nut to believe in the Old Testament.

Tom: Like in Creation? Like in God’s choice of Abraham and Israel? Like in an exodus? Like in God’s judgment upon Israel? Like in the prophetic role? Like in the anticipation of Messiah? Like in Christ's fulfilling prophecies?

Zach: It's like believing in Western Philosophy.

Tom: Define Western Philosophy.

Zach: There is so much that is contradictory that believing in the Old Testament as a whole doesn't make much sense.

Tom: Do you believe ANY of it? Why?

Zach: It is my belief that God tolerates suffering out of respect for human free will…

Tom: It’s my belief that God doesn’t give a rip about our freedom PER SE. He only cares about freedom because of what such freedom makes possible. It’s the loving relationship that must be freely chosen that God respects/loves/desires. Freedom isn’t a value in and of itself. But what it gets us is very valuable.

Zach: I have found that ideas like "Christ's glory" and "God's divine purpose" are notoriously vague.

Tom: Do you ever intentionally glorify Christ? Ever worship Christ? What do you believe yourself to be doing?

Zach: If glory is most served by creating free people, subjecting them to a high probability of suffering, and then killing those who do not choose to glorify their owner, then I am opposed to glory. Not out of any theological reasoning, but just out of gut revulsion. Do we really feel like worshipping someone whose desire for self-glorification does not stop even when it puts billions of people at risk?

Tom: Just plopping “putting billions at risk” without unpacking it is just as mistakenly vague and unhelpful as just plopping “glory” out there without unpacking it. You complain about the latter but not the former. So, it all depends Zach. It all depends.

Tom

Post Edited (TGB) : 11/15/2006 10:27:11 AM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Sahid) : 11/15/2006 5:15:49 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (Sahid) : 11/16/2006 4:44:02 PM (GMT-6)

Post Edited (jefscott) : 11/16/2006 5:31:43 PM (GMT-6)

What the heck! Let's pull this back up.

Jeff-

I was reading back through ths thread. Interesting. I still think a ‘representational’ view over and against strict penal ‘substitutionary’ view makes best sense. Substitution is in a real sense present when an authorized ‘one’ acts on behalf of the ‘whole’, yes. Maybe it’s just the forensic analogy that’s being overplayed by most penal substitutionary views. If Christ is authorized (as both God AND a member of humanity) to act on our behalf, then humanity IS taking responsibility for its actions. In Christ, humanity experiences the consequence of its sin. So while ‘individual’ human beings are substituted for by Christ in the sense that they're not subjectively experiencing the consequences of their sin, it’s perhaps more true to say that they’re acting in and through their representative.

The beef folks have with the penal substitutionary view is the notion of an angry God it offers, one that won't forgive until somebody pays! While I think that's a bad vision of God, I think it's just as wrong to conclude that that's the only kind of God with whom our reconciliation would require a 'substitutionary' approach. That's what I'm wondering.

And what would this mean for our understanding of ‘forgiveness’? Because if ‘forgiveness’ means ‘just blowing off the consequences’, so that they’re essentially ‘buried’ and never embraced at all, then there’s no need to understand the sufferings of Christ as being experienced "on our behalf" at all. If God could affect reconciliation apart from the Cross, then we SHOULDN'T understand our reconciliation in terms OF the Cross. Why should we? If God's the sort of God who WOULD reconcile and forgive us while just blowing off the consequences, then that's what God DID DO, in which case the Cross is not about us PERIOD. But there’s just too much in the NT about ‘payment’ and ‘ranson’ that Christ embraces ‘on our behalf’ to say that Christ’s death isn’t this kind of an action. That's always been my problem with the Christus Victor model.

We were just chatting about this in the car today and Greg mentioned having introduced (in the Four Views book you’re reading Jeff) C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia where Aslan offers himself to the Witch on the table. Greg wants to say that this was first and most fundamentally a ‘cosmic’ act done to defeat the Witch that only subsequently has benefits for us. We get redeemed for and forgiven as a kind of metaphysical fall-out of a more primarily cosmic God-Satan encounter. That’s the Christus Victor model, I think.

But still there’s the question of Jesus’ own explanation of his death as a ‘ransom for many’ and this being the reason he came. I’m not exactly sure how much weight to give the cosmic over the anthropological in understanding atonement. I don’t want to emphasize the former so much that forgiveness of human beings (under the latter) can’t ITSELF require the former. It seems sometimes that Greg wants to say, “Look, Jesus’ dying for us isn’t a necessary condition for our salvation. If it was just forgiving us so we could go to heaven, God gives that to anybody who repents and has faith.” But it seems to me that if you say this, then it doesn’t follow that our redemption is even an indirect benefit from the fall-out of Christ’s cosmic defeat of Satan, a kind of side-benefit. It would be entirely unrelated to it if it’s the case that it’s not a necessary condition for it.

I’m thinking of that passage in which Jesus talks about the strongman. You can’t take the spoils if you don’t first bind the strongman. This was Jesus’ understanding of his ministry. There IS a causal relationship between ‘binding and so disarming the strongman’ SO THAT one can ‘take the spoils’. This suggests that the cosmic is en route to the anthropological. Jesus binds and defeats Satan SO THAT we can be redeemed. In fact, Jeff, why drive such a wedge between the ‘cosmic’ and the ‘anthropological’ at all? There’s ONE creation. Humanity IS part of creation. And given our place over the created order as God’s image on earth, why should we subordinate the anthropological to the cosmic? Think of Paul’s belief that creation groans until it’s redeemed. When? When humanity is resurrected, when OUR redemption is complete, then rest of the cosmos FOLLOWS.

True, the redemption of humanity/the cosmos is ‘the spoils’ which can only be had IF the strongman is bound and defeated. It’s true that our redemption follows from divine victory over Satan. But it doesn't follow that the redemption of the created order isn't the primary GOAL of the incaration and cross the redemption of which is only possible through the spoiling of the strongman. If that’s the kind of priority Greg means, fine. But it looks to me like he doesn’t want to say the defeat of Satan was a necessary condition for the redemption of humanity and the cosmos. It's always sounded to me like Greg thought there was some OTHER score God had to settled with Satan, something irrespective of redeeming us and the created order, and that other score is what Christ comes to settle. I think that though God’s defeat of Satan is PRIOR in terms of strategy (first bind the strongman, then take the spoils), it’s SECONDARY in terms of PURPOSE. And I never felt like Greg was saying THIS.

Tom

Post Edited (MANY) : 7/5/2007 7:11:10 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (MANY) : 7/5/2007 11:02:05 PM (GMT-5)

I don't have any problems with what either of you guys have said. In Greg's article, though, it seems he is struggling to not be MISunderstood. And in doing so, he seems to MIScommunicate. I don't have time right now, but I'll post the pertinent statement from that article later and why I think it's confusing.

I've been so confused myself that I've come to see the matter like this: It is not that God CAN not forgive in the sense of not having the power or the desire to forgive. Rather, He CAN not forgive in such a way that His true attributes are not perfectly revealed. As you say Tom, it seems that God goes out of His way to make it clear that He WILL not just blow off sin. So by the particular mode of forgiveness He has chosen, He still REVEALS His incorruptible nature--a nature that is so sympathetic that it is fundamentally troubled by mis-relation and the needless suffering it causes.

So I'm kind of in between Zach and the more traditionally articulated view of substitution. Unlike Zach, I think there are rules to life in the sense that all humans exist FOR something. If there were truly NO rules to life, it would be equivalent, seemingly, to saying we don't exist for any end whatsoever with respect to volitional behavior. But this seems clearly false to me. But unlike some articulations of substitution, I wouldn't say, at this time, that Christ's death is causally effective in some "natural" way. Rather, it is a propiation or satisfaction of the Father. It satisfies Him in that it reveals as clearly as possible the incorruptible nature of the godhead and the reason why sin was to result in death even before the Fall. God would rather suffer a redemptive, revelatory act than MIScommunicate who He is.

In THIS SENSE, I say God can't just blow off sin or forgive in the way we do. When we forgive, we are doing what we want others to do for us. NOT SO, with God.

Post Edited (jefscott) : 7/6/2007 6:31:24 AM (GMT-5)