Atonement Theories

Well then we shall have exactly zero agreement, because this is precisely the area of discussion. The question is whether one can change "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" into "My God, My God, you haven't forsaken Me," which is essentially saying that a horse chestnut is really a chestnut horse.

The Bible tells us that there are indeed certain things that God cannot do. He cannot lie (Numbers 23:19; Titus 1:2), and more pertinently for this discussion, He cannot deny Himself (2 Timothy 2:13).

 

Quite easily: The same way the Psalm itself does.

It's called context and not cherry-picking, and understanding the perspective of the narrator/person quoting (David & Jesus).

This is easily resolved by reference to the experience of the person praying, where it seems to him (and, frankly, to all the onlookers), as though God has forsaken him. And it is in precisely this moment that the trial is the most sincere: Here is where he will either keep faith and bless the LORD, or else bring an accusation against Him.

And so he cries out to God with the voice of the Psalm, acknowledging his limitation and then remembering the days of old, and pondering on the works of His hands, learning obedience by the things which He suffers, even unto death.

So I could even come to agreement with you if you were able to limit the "abandonment of the Father" to the context of the experience of the situation's quality by the rational human nature assumed by the Word. But if you are going to insist on going beyond and making Ps. 22:1, and Jesus' use of it from the Cross, into a statement of absolute reality in terms of the Father's actual relationship to Him, I cannot go there at all.

 

I think it may be helpful to think out a little further what we mean by the presence of God
As they say on cookery programmes, here's something I prepared earlier, on my blog:

The presence of God can be understood in four ways.

Firstly, God is everywhere; He is ‘omni-present.’ This is one of His ‘incommunicable attributes,’ meaning that it is something that He is that mankind never can be. ‘”Do I not fill heaven and earth?” Says the LORD’ (Jer. 23:24). The Locus Classicus for this doctrine is Psalm 139:7-12, but it is found all through the Bible. God is not only present in this sense with believers, but with all mankind. Paul could tell the pagan philosophers in Athens, “…..He is not far from each one of us’ (Acts 17:27). I have heard atheists joke that at least in hell they won’t be bothered with God any more, but that isn’t strictly true. They will indeed know nothing of His blessing or His guidance through all eternity, but that does not mean that they will be free of Him. ‘’If anyone worships the beast and his image………he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb’ (Rev. 14:9-10).

Secondly, there was the Shekinah Glory which was the visible presence of God in the Pillar of Cloud and the Pillar of Fire that led the Israelites through the desert (Exod. 13:21-22). In Exodus 33, Moses pleaded with God not to withdraw His presence from the people. “If Your presence does not go with us, do not bring us up from here. For how then will it be known that Your people and I have found grace in Your sight unless You go with us?” (vs. 15-16). It was also the presence of God in the Temple (2 Chron. 7:1-2) until Ezekiel saw it withdraw shortly before the destruction of the Temple because of the sins of the Israelites (Ezek. 10). This glory was something external to the people. God had made His dwelling-place among them, but not within them, and it had no power to conform them to God’s righteous requirements and therefore they fell into sin.

Thirdly, God indwells His people today (John 14:23-24). When someone is born again, God makes His home within his heart by the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19). This is not necessarily something experiential, but it is permanent and unchangeable, ‘For He Himself has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you”’ (Heb. 13:5), and, ‘The gifts and calling of God are irrevocable’ (Rom. 11:29). This presence of God is not confined to the New Testament. The O.T. saints who looked forward to the coming of the Messiah also possessed it. When David had committed sins for which the Mosaic Law offered no forgiveness (Lev. 15:30-31), He was able to go directly to God and plead for mercy (Psalm 51).

Fourthly, there is the felt presence of God; our experience of God’s indwelling. ‘For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God’ (Rom. 8:15-16). The Christian should ‘walk in the Spirit’ (Gal. 5:16)- that is, he should live his life in the consciousness of being a child of God. But there are times when the Holy Spirit comes alongside us and whispers to us, “You believe you are a child of God? Well, I’m telling you that you are one.”

So is this felt presence of God something that is regular and permanent, or does it come and go? Well, I think the experience of the saints is that God sometimes seems very near, and sometimes distressingly far away. The Psalmist cries out, “Return, O LORD! How long [will it be]?” (Psalm 90:13). There would be no point in asking God to return, if He was always present in exactly the same way. We are instructed, ‘Draw near to God and He will draw near to you’ (James 4:8). How could God draw near if He is always at the same distance? Is it not your own experience, if you are a Christian, that sometimes God seems so near that praise and prayer and worship just pours out of you, but at other times, and all too often, the heavens seem as brass and you have to push yourself to express your love to God as you should? This lack of, and yearning for, experiential fellowship with God is found in Psalm 42. ‘As the deer pants for the water brooks, so pants my soul for You, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?’ When David fell into sin, he lost the close fellowship with God that he had known. He could not lose God altogether, but he had lost His felt presence. Therefore he cried out, “Do not cast me away from Your presence, and do not take Your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me by Your generous Spirit’ (Psalm 51:11-12).

Very often the loss of God’s felt presence is our own fault. As James 4:8 suggests, it is we who have wandered away from Him into our own Bypath Meadows, and quenched the Holy Spirit (1 Thes. 5:19) by our worldliness, or grieved Him (Eph. 4:30) by our petty sins and perfunctory repentance. The Holy Spirit is just that- holy. He will not remain in close contact where there is sin without true repentance. This temporary withdrawal is designed to bring the errant Christian back to Him. ‘For His anger is but for a moment; His favour is for life; weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning’ (Psalm 30:5).

But at other times, the loss of this experiential relationship with God has nothing to do with our sinfulness. It seems that God at times withdraws His felt presence from us to test us, so that we may know what it is truly to walk by faith. ‘The crucible for silver and the furnace for gold, but the LORD tests the hearts’ (Prov. 17:3). When God seems so far away, will we trust in Him and worship Him still in spirit and in truth, or will we seek substitutes for Him as the Israelites did with the golden calf? ‘Who among you fears the LORD? Who obeys the voice of His Servant? Who walks in darkness and has no light? Let Him trust in the name of the LORD and rely upon his God. Look, all you who kindle a fire; who encircle yourselves with sparks: walk in the light of your fire and in the sparks you have kindled- this you shall have from My hand: you shall lie down in torment’ (Isaiah 50:10-11).

So let us now turn our minds to the words of the Lord Jesus Christ upon the cross. “My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me?’ In what way was our Lord forsaken by the Father? Surely it can only be in in the way of the loss of the Father’s felt presence. It goes without saying that the three Persons of the Trinity must always have enjoyed the closest relationship. ‘He [Christ] was in the beginning with God’ (John 1:2). ‘When He marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside Him as a master craftsman; and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him’ (Prov. 8:29-30). And the Lord Jesus could say, “And He who sent Me is with Me. The Father has not left Me alone, for I always do the things that please Him’ (John 8:29; cf. also John 16:32; 17:23-26).

But there on the cross, the Son is left utterly alone. Why did The Father remove His felt presence from Him? Was it to test Him? Or was it because of sin? Without doubt it was the latter. God had no reason to test His Son, although He was indeed tested when He faced the devil in the desert and resisted Him faithfully. No, it was because of sin that the Father forsook His sinless Son. He was the sin-bearer; ‘For [God] made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him’ (2 Cor. 5:21). There on the cross, God laid all our sins upon the Saviour’s sinless shoulders and He paid the penalty in full. Part of that penalty is separation from God. ‘These shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power’ (2 Thes. 1:9). As described earlier, the wicked in hell will know nothing of God’s presence but His abiding wrath. This is the sentence we all deserve (Rom. 3:9), and so Christ endured upon the cross something He had never known before- utter loneliness; the silence of heaven; total separation from His Father. He endured our hell that we might gain His heaven, saved by grace at measureless cost. Because He was deserted, His people will never be deserted. Because He has suffered, not one of those for whom He died will undergo the suffering their sins deserve. What a Saviour, who, when there was nothing in us to recommend us to Him, ‘died for the ungodly’ (Rom. 5:6)! What a God, ‘who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all’ (Rom. 8:32)!

From The Presence of God and the Desertion of Christ

 

Would you please explain this to me in more simple language? Thanks! Abandonment seems to me to be rather like pregnancy; either one is or one isn't.

 

Thank you for the kind words.

Regarding "winning" ... I don't expect to, for the exact reason you said. I have three goals here in continuing with Martin.

1) To have the deepest conversation about these things possible with someone who is, frankly, the most informed and Scripture-based PSA guy I've come across so far. I might learn a thing or two.

2) Given that, I also want to see where the conversation starts to break down, because that can be informative as well.

3) Finally, I do hope to be useful to anyone interested in another viewpoint than PSA.

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You basically did what I said here in your post immediately prior (post 143), by framing the abandonment as limited to the human experience. We can work with that. I have a couple of observations/objections, of course, but I'll address those as a separate post quoting from yours.

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Substantially agreed. (Reservation of agreement on certain irrelevant particulars.)

Color me doubtful. Lol

Not per se, no. But He certainly has a reason to test humanity in exactly the thing that got us thrown into corruption and out of Paradise in the first place. His purpose is to destroy the works of the devil, of which that was the first and root.

Ok, now we're just repeating ourselves. I addressed this already in the four-part post above.


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In fact, the pedigree of any doctrine is totally unimportant; what matters is whether or not it is true. However, as I have stated and shown several times, the Doctrine of Penal Substitution can be found in several of the ECFs, starting with Justin Martyr. If @Steve Allen wants chapter and verse, I suppose I can trot the quotations out yet again.

Interestingly, and to my surprise, I found a quote from Irenaeus the other day which seems to support Penal Substitution, although his main teaching seems to be propitiation by the life and obedience of our Lord rather than by His passion.

 

Nope! Happily retired.

 

I am always interested in what the Fathers have to say about a topic, yes. You don't need to supply the quotes, but if you want to give me the references, I can look them up on my own (or just link to them if they're available online).

Would be curious to see this as well.

EDIT: Although perhaps another thread would be the best place for it.

"PSA in the ECF" or some such.

 

OK. Let's deal with this. I don't know what your knowledge of Greek is, but 'everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord' is olethron aionion apo prosopou tou kupiou. Apo with the genitive has the meaning of 'from' and it can mean either separation (i.e. 'away from') or origin (e.g. apo tes charas, 'For (from) joy' Matthew 13:44). So linguistically, either of us might be correct; it depends on context. But prosopon means literally 'face.' In those days before photographs and Skype, if you saw someone's face you were in his presence. When God tells the Psalmist, 'Seek My face' (e.g. Psalm 27:8), He is telling him to seek His gracious presence.

So it is not God's face that will give these people everlasting destruction. If that were the meaning, there is no reason to put 'face' in the text. The destruction can only come from the Lord anyway. No, the meaning of the verse is that the everlasting destruction will be away from the presence of the Lord; that they will know nothing of His gracious presence but only His abiding wrath.

Also, apo appears again in Romans 9:3. 'For I could wish myself accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers.....' This clearly means that he could wish himself parted from Christ, rather than cut off by Christ.

I don't want to pass myself off as a great Greek expert, though I have studied it. If someone like @John of Japan wants to correct me on the Greek, I am prepared to stand corrected. However, I am not unsupported. William Hendricksen, who is a well regarded modern(ish) commentator wrote, 'The very fact that this destruction is "everlasting" shows that it does not amount to 'annihilation' or 'going out of existence.' On the contrary it indicates an existence "away from the face of the Lord and from the glory of His might."' And the ESV translation gives '.....away from the presence of the Lord.....'

With this I cease for a while. My sermon preparation awaits!

 

I agree with your analysis of the Greek (since you mentioned me ). So does old A. T. Robertson, the great Greek grammarian of a previous generation: "Destruction (cf. 1Th 5:3) does not mean here annihilation, but, as Paul proceeds to show, separation from the face of the Lord (apo prosôpou tou kuriou) and from the glory of his might (kai apo tês doxês tês ischuos autou), an eternity of woe such as befell Antiochus Epiphanes" (Word Pictrues in the NT, accessed through Power Bible CD).

 

Thank you, John.

 

Intermediate. I can read it to varying levels of understanding pretty easily, and I'm pretty familiar with a lot of the vocabulary, and basic conjugation and cases. I use various lexicons if I run into something I don't recognize.

I did check the Greek before posting my original observation, and I was already familiar with the fact that apo can be either "away from" or "off of." Now I have examined other instances of the same construction elsewhere, and I see that it really does admit of either reading, and I can demonstrate that with some more time, which I don't have now before the thread closes, unfortunately.

Hey hey! Adding qualifiers is moving the goalposts! LOL

But in this case I'll allow it because I think it's important to the discussion to note that there is a qualification of the type of presence experienced.

No, there are other places in Scripture where they use the same construction, including "face", and it seems unnecessary there as well.

Yes, but saying it comes from the face of the Lord and His strong glory -- which, we are told elsewhere (2 Cor. 4:6), shines from His face -- indicates that the punishment they are receiving is from the glory. Recall how the Jews could not even look on the glory of Moses' face. How much more burning (for our God is a consuming fire) must the glory of the Lord in all His beauty be? And who is to say that this is not also the brightness of the burning of His wrath against sin?

This is why the wicked flee from before His face. As do the earth and the heavens. And there was found no place for them. So either things fleeing from the face of God at the judgment are annihilated (which neither of us believe), or this being driven/fleeing (it's mutual, frankly) from the face of the Lord is an impossible flight, and they are caught in the fire. Which Peter indicates regarding the heavens and the earth already:

The "times of refreshing from the face of the Lord" the Peter speaks of in Acts is precisely the time he speaks of in his epistle.

This is why the Psalmist sings:

Does wax melt "away from" fire? Absolutely (due to gravity, mostly, but still). But is the reason it melts the fire? Also without a doubt.

So maybe it's both! They will want to be sent away from His face, to not be able to see Him or feel Him. That would be a blessing, not a torment! (They hate Him anyway.)

In fact, St. Paul seems to think it's both, too:

These are one and the same. No difference.

Have fun.