First of all, thank you for an engaging conversation; I always enjoy learning about different perspectives. Even though I don’t necessarily agree with them.

Now, we’ve reached a theological impasse, since I shan’t convince you to believe that God can be angry with sin, and you shan’t convince me that He isn’t angry with sin, thanks to the weight of verses in the Old and New Testaments describing His wrath.

What I wanted to respond to was this comment here: As a practical matter, I’d far rather bet on the doctrinal interpretations of the Apostolic Fathers and the Pre-Nicene Fathers than on those of recreational bloggers (or even serious-minded modern Bible scholars) whose entire basis for Biblical interpretation is a bunch of translated words on a page.

Certainly the church fathers make a very good source for correct doctrine, living as they did so much closer to the original events. But the sovereign God of the universe certainly has the capability to preserve His word throughout the centuries, and thus even translations, if done to promote God’s word and not for ulterior political reasons, are trustworthy.

The Lord has given His children the Holy Spirit to help in interpretation, and thus no Christian should kowtow to scholarly interpretations, though scholars’ work, effort, and extensive knowledge should certainly be respected.

But, I appreciate your point-of-view and also the additions to my reading list.

Cheers! Kimberly

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Kimberly: He sacrificed Himself , for God and Jesus (although not one, that would be heresy) are intertwined into one nature so it is more like a self-sacrifice than anything else.

But he returned to life after three days. And not just human life, but his glorious, eternal life. In what way did he really sacrifice anything?

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At the outset, I would again like to register my distaste for “proof-texting.” I acclaim the words of Henry Neufeld when he says “. . . the use of the proof texts is a method that can be twisted to support a variety of viewpoints, that encourages spiritual and intellectual laziness, and produces a form of certainty without an adequate foundation. We need to make our Bible study (or the study of any text) serious by taking the time and effort to hear what the writer is actually saying, rather than abusing his words to support whatever structure we have already built.” I’d go a bit further, even, to say that we need to make our Bible study serious by taking the time and effort to hear what the writerS are actually saying, for, if we are convinced that the Scriptures are indeed truthful, we should rightly expect that they will function as a noncontradictory and coherent whole.

I will also say again that we must do our best to understand the words of Scripture in the context and cultures in which the words were written, rather than the context and culture in which the interpreter lives. This means that we cannot afford simply to see the word “justice” in our English translations and fill it with our notions of the Roman courtroom and retribution any more than we can simply see the word “punishment” in such translations and assume that koine Greek contained one word for retribution and another for corrective acts (which, I understand, it did not).

Your comment that “Ideas are dangerous when they claim that the church has been wrong for almost all of its history (such as the idea that both Protestants and Catholics are wrong)” reflects an unfortunate absence of understanding of Church history in our modern Western culture. Remember that the Church—new Israel—took over the reins of God’s people from the old Israel on Pentecost following Christ’s Ascension. There was only One Church, recited by some still in the Nicene Creed. This Church gave birth to many writings, including the books that were recognized centuries after their writing as the New Testament. The people who lived after the Apostles left volumes of writing from which we can see their struggles with various doctrinal issues which we now take for granted and accept as basic Christianity—the existence of the Holy Trinity, Christ’s divine and human natures, etc. This state of affairs existed for over 1,000 years after Christ’s Ascension—One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church that determined the heretical nature of Arianism, monophysitism, monotholetism, and the like, took dogmatic stands on essential matters of the faith, and would have nothing to do with those who insisted on holding to heresy. It was precisely the claim of Rome that the church had been wrong for its entire existence that caused the Roman Catholics to separate itself from communion with the rest of the Churches, and it was from Rome that the phenomenon of Protestantism arose, claiming, again, that the only church it had known had been wrong for almost all of its history, as well. Your comment doubly brands Protestant ideas as dangerous and, simultaneously, fails to comprehend that the ideas I am putting forth, here, are precisely the ideas that were held by the Church and its members prior to the self- separation of Rome in the eleventh century. Perhaps a graphic timeline similar to one published in Time magazine several years ago may help; try here: http://www.saintignatiuschurch.org/timeline.html

Following this same vein, I’ll note that I would also be bothered if I perceived that an author was trying to make God somehow more “palatable” or easy to accept. However, the author isn’t saying anything novel. He is recapitulating the views of the Church on this matter as they existed prior to Roman separation and as they still exist today within what is known as the Eastern Orthodox Church. The views of the Church are easily found in the writings of the Church Fathers, including the Cappadocian Fathers (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cappadocian_Fathers) who played extremely significant roles in formulating the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, suppressing Arianism, approving Scripture as authoritative, and assembling the Creed—all based on their assessment of the writings and traditions that had been handed down to them from the Apostles, their contemporaries, and those who followed them. As a practical matter, I’d far rather bet on the doctrinal interpretations of the Apostolic Fathers and the Pre-Nicene Fathers than on those of recreational bloggers (or even serious-minded modern Bible scholars) whose entire basis for Biblical interpretation is a bunch of translated words on a page or, at best, the academic speculations of someone who lived 1,000 years (Anselm?) or 1,500 years (Luther? Calvin?) after Christ and had no continuity with the Church as it existed during the first millennium.

I note that you lump into one the concepts of guilt, sin, death, and condemnation, just as you equate God’s holiness with Roman courtroom retributive punishment or “justice.” Likewise, you unwarrantedly fashion God’s warning of natural consequences into an announcement of imposed retribution. The complexity of this subject and your unfamiliarity with the historic Church’s understanding of the ancestral sin really demand more precision in terminology. Nonetheless, let’s take a very small sample of how the Church Fathers viewed such assertions, and particularly that “death IS a punishment from God.”

St. John Chrysostom (Commentary on the Hebrews, Homily 4)- “Next he sets down also the cause of the economy i.e. the Incarnation. “That through death,” he says, “He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.” Here he points out the wonder, that by what the devil prevailed, by that was he overcome, and the very thing which was his strong weapon against the world, namely, Death, by this Christ smote him. In this he exhibits the greatness of the conqueror’s power. Dost thou see how great good death hath wrought?” Death is clearly the weapon of the devil and not of God.

St. Basil the Great (Homily That God is not the Cause of Evil)- “Thus God did not create death, but we brought it upon ourselves by a wicked intention. To be sure, for the reason stated above, he did not prevent our dissolution (our death), so that our weakness might not remain as immortal.” In other words, God is not the author of death, but God does permit death as a mercy to us so that death and corruption will not reign over our natures forever.

St. Irenaeus of Lyons (Against Heresies)- “”But on as many as, according to their own choice, depart from God, He inflicts that separation from Himself which they have chosen of their own accord. But separation from God is death, and separation from light is darkness; and separation from God consists in the loss of all the benefits which He has in store. Those, therefore, who cast away by apostasy these forementioned things, being in fact destitute of all good, do experience every kind of punishment. God, however, does not punish them immediately of Himself, but that punishment falls upon them because they are destitute of all that is good. Now, good things are eternal and without end with God, and therefore the loss of these is also eternal and never-ending. It is in this matter just as occurs in the case of a flood of light: those who have blinded themselves, or have been blinded by others, are for ever deprived of the enjoyment of light. It is not, [however], that the light has inflicted upon them the penalty of blindness, but it is that the blindness itself has brought calamity upon them: and therefore the Lord declared, “He that believeth in Me is not condemned,” that is, is not separated from God, for he is united to God through faith. On the other hand, He says, “He that believeth not is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God;” that is, he separated himself from God of his own accord. “For this is the condemnation, that light is come into this world, and men have loved darkness rather than light. For every one who doeth evil hateth the light, and cometh not to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that he has wrought them in God.” For those unfamiliar with St. Irenaeus, he lived in the 2nd centurey and was a disciple of Polycarp (who was, himself, a disciple of St. John the Evangelist).

To say that Kalomiros forgets what we mean by the word “Trinity” is naïve, at best. Kalomiros is, in fact, conveying the substance of the understanding of those persons who were instrumental in the early fights (and fights there were) over this very mystery. You, in fact, are confusing Persons and Essence and Nature. This is understandable, of course, in that one must stray from the historic Church’s understanding of the Trinity to make sense of a satisfaction theory of Atonement. Which is precisely why I suggested earlier that a believer in the satisfaction theory must be at least a di-theist, with the Person of God the Father—angry and wrathful and demanding satisfaction—being one deity and the Person of God the Son—loving, self-sacrificing, etc.—being yet another deity. This is not the forum for a discusson of the mystery of the Holy Trinity, so I will simply recommend that you bolster your understanding of this by immersing yourself in the writings of the eary Church councils who set forth this dogma over the course of several centuries.

I could go on and on with quotes from the Church Fathers (other than, perhaps, Tertullian and Augustine) that demonstrate a collective understanding by them of the justice of God as putting relationships right and not as satisfation/reparation-demanding courtroom vindication of rights, death as self-induced separation from/rejection of God as the natural consequence of sin, physical corruption and death introduced as a parasite (and not as natural) into the very nature of man by Adam’s sin brought about by his will and the influence of the God-hating Satan rather than as a punishment from God, and divine punishment as corrective in nature and never retributive. Moreover, these Church Fathers were far closer chronologically to the Apostles and the culture of the early Church than any of us could ever hope to be and certainly closer than the likes of Anselm, Aquinas, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Calvin who developed and perpetuated the Western understanding of this topic in such a way that is inconsistent with that of the early Church.

As for Kalomiros’ assertion that those in the West believe Satan to be a minister of God for punishment of men in hell, I won’t defend his assertion (as I agree with your statement re. Protestant beliefs) other than to suggest that Kalomiros may be implying that, in the West, Satan as the tempter becomes the tool of God to administer death and is, in this sense, a minister of God for punishment of men in hell, even though the West understands, as you point out, Satan to be likewise punished/tormented by God’s will.

I think you should look more carefully, as well, at his assertion that atheism is the consequence of Western theology, for it seems you ascribe too much to it. Kalomiros is not stating that Western theology is the sole cause of atheism but that atheism was unknown in Eastern Christianity, manifesting itself there only when certain theologians attempted to accept or graft onto the East’s theology these principles of Western theology. His point, here, is that when one introduces into human thought the concept of a God who is angry and punishing, the rational human’s reaction will be one of two: (1) rejection and flight (atheism) or (2) attempts at appeasement. Indeed, he would likely see your reference to Greek philosophers as further evidence of his statement—as anthropomorphized gods who were often angry and spiteful were the religion of the day in ancient Greece and caused either attempts at appeasement or, as you correctly point out, atheism.

Your agreement with his implication that, in the West, salvation is from the wrath of God is telling. In the West, the question, whether from a Roman Catholic or a Protestant, is essentially “Are you SAVED?” That is, is your soul in such a state that you will avoid hell? In the East, as the continuation of the early Church, the question is more aptly put “Are you being healed?” That is, are you in such a relationship with God that you are more closely conforming yourself to Him and growing in holiness such that the grip that the disease of sin has over you is loosening?

The point of my postings here is not really to argue these points but simply to reveal to those of you who are serious seekers after God that the angry god about which Tony writes is absent, other than in Augustine and Tertullian, in the first millennium of the Church’s existence. As I have tried to demonstrate, the angry God is a theological innovation in the West that is created through scholastic speculation by men who, through unfortunate historic and linguistic circumstances, had been separated from the theology espoused by the Church Fathers who did not write in Latin. It is solely on the basis of this speculation grounded firmly in man’s concepts of fairness and the judiciary, that the concept of “the transactional God,” demanding satisfaction for sin, has been built.

Thumbs up to Tony for sensing that something was wrong in this. My prayer for all of you serious seekers out there is that you might be spurred to further serious contemplation of this matter and eventually find yourself, as I did, seeking out the hospital rather than fleeing from the jail. As my wish is not to engage in proof-texting, argument, or tit-for-tat over details, I’ll end my comments on Tony’s excellent article at this point.

Jonny

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Thanks for the responses. I’ve been hung up today and may be tomorrow, as well, but I will respond as quickly as I can.

Jonny

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It’s not completely wrong, of course (there’s very little that’s every 100 percent wrong), and probably the truth, as SBG suggested, is in the middle: justice involves both “courtroom” justice and a reconciliation.

What bothered me most of all perhaps, was that the author, troubled by people’s hostility to God, tries to make God more “palatable” if you will in his definitions, easier for us to accept. (God is not supposed to be “easy” for us to accept, for narrow is the way that leads to salvation).

I think in his quest–well-intentioned, certainly, although misguided–he ignores basic biblical evidence pointing towards the justice of God. I’ve listed here the errors I found, along with a correcting Bible verse.

All Roman Catholics and most Protestants consider death as a punishment from God. Death is a punishment for sin. Most of Romans 1 confirms this, but especially verse 32: “who [sinners], knowing the righteous judgment of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those who practice them.” Certainly death is the natural (non-punishment) outpouring of sin, but it is also a punishment as this chapter indicates.

God — for them — is the real cause of death . Whichever way you read this, this is false, even according to Protestanism (which seems to be anathema to you). Romans 5:12: “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned.” I believe in this verse, and in the courtroom justice of God, and there is no contradiction between these two ideas. Protestanism accepts sin as the direct predecessor of death. Check James out as well.

And do they not consider the devil as a minister of God for the eternal punishment of men in hell . Here is a basic misunderstanding: most Protestants realize that God is LORD over all creation and that the devil is tormented in hell. (See Revelation, especially chapter 19).

Is it not salvation from the wrath of God? . God is wrathful. This again is a Biblical idea, and one that cannot be dismissed without dismissing Scripture. There are those in the Old Testament who sinned and “God’s anger burned against them; in Romans 1, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” God is a holy God who cannot tolerate sin. Remember Isaiah’s reaction when brought into God’s presence. It wasn’t “Oh, good, I get to be reconciled to God!” it was “Woe is me! I am a sinner [and thus in danger of impending judgment].”

Atheism is the consequence of Western theology. Uh, no. This is a factual error; athiesm existed looong before Christianity came into being; many of the Greek philosophers were athiests (especially as his author defines them.)

He decided that the guilt of Adam’s disobedience descended equally to all His children, and that all were to be sentenced to death for Adam’s sin, which they did not commit. But everybody has committed a sin, all deserving of death. Yes, Adam’s sin passes on to his descendents, but there’s more to condemntation than that. Here’s Romans 5:14: “Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come.”

Even Christ’s love and sacrifice loses its significance and logic in this schizoid notion of a God who kills God in order to satisfy the so-called justice of God. Here the writer forgets what we mean by the word “Trinity.” God did not kill God, as though it is a bad cop/good cop or as though He is a murderer: He sacrificed Himself , for God and Jesus (although not one, that would be heresy) are intertwined into one nature so it is more like a self-sacrifice than anything else.

So in the language of the Holy Scriptures, “just” means good and loving. Not always. Sometimes (”Noah was a just man and walked with God.) But sometimes words referring to justice (Judge) mean just what we think (”Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?)

If we consider hell as a punishment from God, we must admit that it is a senseless punishment, unless we admit that God is an infinitely wicked being. Not true. God does punish people there–those who, as the article correctly noted, refused His love. See the Great White Throne judgment.

Two concluding thoughts (I know, it’s about time!)
1) Ideas are dangerous when they claim that the church has been going wrong for almsot all of it’s history (such as the idea that both Protestants and Catholics are wrong).
2) Certainly we should not lose sight of God’s love in sight of his justice, but also we cannot lose sight of his justice in view of his love. Both appear in the Bible.

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I truly hope this helps.

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Romans 5:8-11
But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

2 Cor 5:18-21
All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

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The very first articulation of the juridical view of Christ’s work was not done until the 11th century by Anselm in a treatise entitled “Cur Deus Homo?” You can access it on CCEL here: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/anselm/basic_works.viii.html?highlight=anselm#highlight or you can Google it up if you don’t like CCEL’s format.

For those who are really interested in the development of this doctrine, check out Jaroslav Pelikan’s massive work “The Development of Christian Doctrine.” The first volume is particularly instructive. The late Pelikan was a Luthern when he wrote this at Yale, He was this century’s and last’s leading historian of Christian doctrine– unparalleled in his depth and breadth. Interestingly, in his later years, he became Eastern Orthodox.

I assume most of you can navigate CCEL or a similar source to find the Reformers’ points of view on the matter.

Also, you’ll find a clear Roman Catholic explication of the matter if you Google up a copy of Harnack’s History of Dogma.

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Permit me to replicate here the same passage from the New King James Version:
21 But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets,
22 Even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe. For there is no difference;
23 For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
24 Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,
25 Whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed,
26 To demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

Note that this translation does not bear the term “atonement” nor does it bear the term “justice.” Propitiation does not mean some sort of “tit for tat” or pagan concept of divine appeasement but simply means conciliation. This is a particularly stunning concept when you put it together with the Hebrew concept of putting right of relationships which has unfortunately been translated as “justice” in our common English translations and their forebearers. I’m not a real fan of proof-texting, and this difference between your version and the NKJV demonstrates the danger of doing so. I think you’ll find nothing in the NKJV text that is inconsistent with anything I’ve previously stated.

Your use of the term “atonement” belies a Western prejudice and understanding of the nature of sin and death in juridical terms. As I have pointed out in early posts, this has its genesis in a line of reasoning starting with Tertullian and moving through Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. The juridical understanding of divine and human conciliation is foreign to the Fathers of the Church other than Tertullian (who later fell into the heresy of the Ultramontanes) and Augustine, whose Manichean background never quite escapes him. Both of these wrote in Latin and were really the only Fathers whom the West could read, as the West eventually lost contact with the rest of the Church.

The Fathers themselves were much more concerned in the early centuries of the Church with fighting heresies such as Pelagianism, Arianism, Nestorianism, monophysitism, and the like (all rehashed today in the pseudo-Christian sects that rise up) that with mapping out all of the mechanics of soteriology. Thus, only from time to time do you see the Fathers directly address this topic. As a whole, you discover that the Fathers reject any idea that death is a punishment from God (try re-reading Genesis very carefully without this standard presupposition and you just may find it shocking– I know that I did when I first saw it) or that God delivered man into Satan’s hands. They rejected these concepts on the grounds that God is not the author of death and that Satan is owed nothing at all by anyone, least of all by God. Rather than trying to use this forum to propound the entire scheme of salvation, allow me to recommend three excellent books if you wish to explore this further: (1) Gustav Aulen’s “Christus Victor” written by a Lutheran attempting to claim this viewpoint for Martin Luther (I don’t think he succeeds in his argument on Luther but his explication of the historic view of salvation is really quite good; (2) H.E.W. Turner’s “Patristic Doctrine of Redemption” (provides good sources; (3) John Romanides’ “The Ancestral Sin” (this is an excellent source, but his tone can be offputting to some who might be offended by his view that certain Western ideas in this area are not only erroneous but heretical); and (4) an article entitled “River of Fire” which can be found at http://www.orthodoxpress.org/parish/river_of_fire.htm (again, this one can carry a bit of a polemical edge, so approach it with that in mind).

This concept was really pretty mind-blowing/numbing when I first encountered it, as it flew in the face of everything I had ever known. However, as I really thought about Western atonement theology, I found it to be tremendously self-contradictory and unreconcilable to what we really know about God. I hope this helps. Please forgive me if I’ve caused any offense or have said anything misleading or erroneous.

Jonny

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