Jesus and Atonement. What is Sin Really? A Prophetic Think Tank
Dealing with the Proof Texts: God’s wrath
I hope by copying this material I have in no way taken it out of context. On the contrary, I have quoted his work in a way that I hope would cause the author (the article is unsigned) to be pleased that his explanation of the atonement got out accurately through another channel, even if that channel is not very agreeable with his view. I have done this as a compliment to it insofar as I take it as an accurate explanation of penal substitution.
The text is chosen because it’s a typical example of our theological framing. Almost anything else out there could be used to make my same point.
It is our opinion that biblical premises are not for the purpose of dispensing religious concepts such as sin and righteousness, but a kind of sin and righteousness. To strip the kind of righteousness from the concept is to gut the entire concept of objective transcendent meaning, and making it cease to be a demonstrable, historical miracle. Therefore the complaint is not only of the topographical formulations of the Atonement but an abuse of language in presenting it, which destroys all meaning for the Atonement other than as a novel religious idea.
Rebuttal
The God of the bible actively dispenses wrath/retribution for sin. Cites Hanbakkuk 1:13, Romans 12:19, Psalms 2, Rev 6:17.
The iniquity is the iniquity of not believing God’s prophets, who promise protection and provision for Israel, and a glorious future.
The sin of obedience to the Law is driven not from the failure to blindly obey a command. The sin of physical obedience is driven first by spiritual disobedience, and spiritual disobedience is the failure or refusal to give the symbol of the law its rightful and divinely ordained meaning: to connect the Law, in both its function and typological meaning as a pedagogue (Gal 3:24) of its complete, future fulfillment in the oracles of a coming Deliverer.
This Deliverer obeys the law by carrying out these prophetic commands by the Father for his Son, the coming Messiah, to fulfill. “Command” can be taken again in the sense of both of an order without the necessity of essentially knowing why he commands, and one of knowing why the command was given. One is of the kind given to children, the other is required of one who is of spiritual maturity in an exercise of free will and the application of knowledge.
Since Christ is this the fulfiller, he has by definition mastery and full knowledge of the Law’s meaning as a teaching device, not an end in itself. It teaches a command of future fulfillment by his Divine being. Christ’s righteousness in fulfilling it, and his love for it, is in the proof of his mastery, not his blind obedience (John 3:13, 4:34). The proof of his mastery is not moral in our sense of the physical action since this can imply merit by following a script for the personal benefit, but of his credentials as a Divine master, as Christ, by his transcendent power as the Son of God to realize God’s redemptive vision.
The person speaking, Habakkuk, is in the passage similar to Jesus and the oracles as one unit with his office, which is prophetism and God’s prophetic Word. The righteousness of the prophets is not primarily in physical moral performance, it is in his spirit, in his love for God and his Word. His physical performance is primarily in the obeying of God’s command to speak his Word of future fulfillment: to prophesy.
The word of the prophet in relation to the Law is primarily not in giving alms, being sexually pure and not lying. Commands. It is being God’s knowledgeable mouthpiece of His will on history, which obedience is the essence of the Law.
This is why in Habakkuk the sin which is spoken of is spoken over against God’s alternative object of its cure, his prophetic Word:
Habakkuk 1:5-6: “Behold ye among the heathen, and regard, and wonder marvellously: for I will work a work in your days, which ye will not believe, though it be told you. For, lo, I raise up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation, which shall march through the breadth of the land, to possess the dwelling places that are not theirs.”
All of Israel’s sin is the sin of this disbelief in the Divine prophetic motivation of religion, which fuels all sins of performance, particularly ones of religious expression.
Therefore the author’s commentary that this passage is a “picture of a God who is of purer eyes than to behold evil” is stripping the religious concept from its transcendent type, and dealing with the concept as having a very diffuse and indistinct biblical definition. This is done presumably because the making of “evil” prosaic opens the meaning up to the carnal priorities and idiosyncrasies of many people, a scattering abroad (Mt 12:30; Lu 11:23; Joh 10:12) for Christ, like a badly conceived Great Commission. But forcing the concept to orbit exclusively a certain type of “evil” is by definition a demand on the understanding of faith to orbit around it as well.
“Evil,” if we desire to use it, must not be so narrowly defined as resulting in the identification of those who want to perform it and are evil, or else their faith is exposed as that kind of evil. But “Evil” is truly an evil against the Word of God, which is Christ’s messianic oracles: disbelief that God has kept and will keep his word, and a disbelief in the kind of end and redemption that God promised through its knowledge, love, and faith. In Habakkuk, the prophetic utterance sets the subject context as that of prophetic truth, which defines all religious concepts, such as “evil” in a particular miraculous nomenclature.
Wrath
Romans 12:19: “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”
“A God who in fact pours out wrath upon the world of sinners.”
Again, what is “wrath?” What are “sinners.” Is wrath simply an action against an offense? Is a sinner only a sinner in what he does, where what he does is simply not doing what God has told him to do? Our hint is in a casual look at the verse in question. Paul is quoting a prophecy: “I will repay.”
In Psalms 2:1-12, we have a Messianic prophecy. But the author defines “wrath,” “rebel” of/against God has having essentially no reason in his statement “a God who has the rebel nations in derision, who speaks unto them in his wrath.” The prophecy defines wrath as wrath against this specific kind of prophetic disbelief in God’s miraculous Word pertaining to the coming of the Messiah. In Christianity, it is because of the absence of it as our sole faith motivation and theological vital center. We are “rebels” insofar as we are prophesied rebels as well as rebels against God’s prophetic Word.
Revelation 6:17: “For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?”
The author adds simply that this is “proclaiming the great day of his wrath to come.” But again, this is a fulfillment of prophecy. “Proclaiming” is a prophetic proclamation.
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