Featured 2 Corinthians 5:21 doesn't support penal substitution (reposted)

Thank you for engaging with the actual arguments presented!

I think the mistake of your view is to equate Justice (righteousness) with Goodness (morality), which are two separate things in Scripture. As Gregory of Nyssa says: “Justice, separated and taken by itself, is not goodness.” See attached chart.

Goodness refers to order according to the fulfillment of a purpose. Goodness often refers to the created order, as that which God invested His own goodness. "And God SAW that it was good." His goodness is invested in the created order.

Justice refers to that which is owed based on promises made. Covenants, contracts, laws, rights - all refer to promises made to maintain and even to restore moral order. In the Old Testament, there are two words that refer to justice, mishpat and tsedek. Mishpat refers to justice in the external world - the promises made to form a society that protects moral order. Tsedek refers to the individual - the rules they live by and their status according to the covenants of which they are a part. When someone is declared "tsedek" (righteous) that is called "justification." Justification is when a person is declared righteous, and thereby qualified to receive the benefits associated with the covenant according to which they are righteous.

The phrase “doing righteousness and justice” is a translation of "mishpat and tsedek" and occurs frequently (almost 200 times) throughout the bible, and the first time it is introduced is in Genesis 18, see verses 16-19.

Abraham will surely become a great and mighty nation, and in him all the nations of the earth will be blessed. For I have chosen him, so that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice (mishpat and tsedek), so that the Lord may bring upon Abraham what He has spoken about him.

Notice that doing both aspects of justice, mishpat and tsedek, is bracketed before and afterwards with the reference to God's promise to bless all nations through Israel in Genesis 12.

So when we talk about the "righteousness/justice of God" we are talking about His promises/covenants with humanity and specifically His covenant with Israel through Abraham, that through Abraham's offspring all nations would be blessed. The central challenge to God's righteousness/justice in the NT is "God when are you going to fulfill your promise to bless all nations through Abraham's offspring?" The fulfillment of this promise is Jesus. Jesus is how God is proven faithful to his promise to bless all nations through Abraham's offspring, and (downstream) Jesus is how we are declared just according to the covenant. God is just (faithful to His promise to bless all nations through Israel) and justifier (declaring us righteous) of the one who has faith in Jesus (regardless of whether that person is Jew or Gentile).

Romans 10:13 is talking about God's covenant faithfulness. Paul is saying that instead of submitting to God's action in Jesus Christ to fulfill His covenantal promises, these individuals tried to fulfill the covenant themselves through their own actions/rules/standards. The point is that our being declared righteous is downstream from God's actions to fulfill his promises through Jesus.

 

That is crude and irreverent but it does show how with your explanation the death of Christ was unnecessary.

Huh? In my illustration, Jesus jumps into the river of death.

 

Using the word justice as if it is interchangeable with righteousness is to misuse the word.

No, justice and righteousness are the exact same word in the New Testament. It would be best if we switched the word "righteousness" to "justice" throughout the whole New Testament, rather than taking our preconceived theological or philosophical commitments and projecting them on to the text in how we translate it.

"Righteousness and justice" in the Old Testament refers to the two words "mishpat and tsedek." This is an area where English translations have obscured the original languages, unfortunately.

Sorry, which part of your post did I miss that you are interested in my response to?

 

Jesus jumping into the river of death in my illustration represents his suffering and dying.

I am simply following the narrative set forth by Ephesians 2:1-10.

We are already dead in trespasses and sins. We are already children of wrath, exiled from Paradise and the Presence of God (Genesis 1) and living in a creation that God subjected to futility (Romans 8), consigned to physical death in the future. God has already been revealing from heaven his wrath against all ungodliness AND unrighteousness (two separate concepts by the way).

But Jesus has died with us, so what we can rise in him.

The problem is we are dead in sin. The solution is resurrection in Christ.

I am not ignoring the necessity of Jesus' death or the wrath of God.

Your view of sin is the one that is not as serious, as you present sin as only a problem because God punishes it. God certainly punishes sin, but tell me, if God never lifted a finger to punish sin, would sin itself still plunge sinners into destruction and misery? I say yes.

 

How can you minimize something you say God disapproves of.

I am not sure how I am minimizing. I am adding another category to sin's destructive consequences.

Me:
1) sin is intrinsically destructive in and of itself, independent from and prior to the wrath of God
2) God also punishes sin

Them (most PSA advocates I talk to):
1) sin only results in destructive consequences because God punishes it.

What natural consequence is more important than God's disapproval?

Not a matter of "more important." Sin's intrinsic destruction happens prior to God's wrath, because the destruction and disorder takes place in the act of sin itself.

What is worse than disobeying God?

Nothing. I am adding further description to why sin is so bad, in addition to God punishing disobedience. We are designed to love God and enjoy Him forever. When we rebel against Him, we rebel against our own design and our own joy in the act itself, necessarily doing disorder, destruction and dissatisfaction in the act of sin itself.

What natural consequence of sin is not ultimately the result of God's created will and order?

Sin is an act of creature, not of Creator. It is humans that commit the act of disorder, destruction, and dissatisfaction that inherent to sin. Not God.

You are still skirting around the issue that Christ's death had something to do directly for us in regards to our sinful condition.

I don't understand this charge at all.

I say, his death and shed blood had a specific purpose. I'm not a theologian and don't represent any group or school of thought so I am not a stickler on how this is put - but his death did something for us and it had to do with our sin. And it had to do with more than our general sinful state as a member of the human race - it had something to do with our individual committed sins.

I disagree with nothing here. But you also haven't presented penal substitution.

Here is a thorough explanation of the atonement and justice relationship. This might be helpful:

Due to God’s gracious covenant, justice requires restoration for damage suffered by innocent parties. Humans have totally and severely damaged themselves by their own sin (God is not damaged by our sin. In the case of sin against God, sin is an offense that damages the offender). God desires to enact restoration for this destruction, but humans are not innocent, they are guilty. There is none righteous, not one. So the question is: How can a just God, a covenant God, enact restoration for guilty humanity’s self-destruction? Answer: God becomes a human in the person of Jesus Christ, lives completely innocently (or righteously) and therefore merits the covenantal blessings by which humanity’s destruction will be restored. Jesus then voluntarily endures all of humanity’s sinful destruction against himself by suffering crucifixion at the hands of all humans on the cross. He therefore merits restoration for all of humanity’s sinful destruction, for he alone has suffered sin’s destruction as an innocent party. This restoration manifests in His resurrection, when “God raised our Great Shepherd up from the dead through the blood of the eternal covenant (Heb 13:20).” So the correct response to the question “Why did Jesus die?” is: in order for all suffering and death to be repaired by God in accordance with his justice, all suffering and death had to be endured by a perfectly innocent and righteous person (for only innocent persons have the right of restoration for wrongs suffered) and only Jesus qualifies as that perfectly righteous person.

Divine justice is therefore satisfied in the resurrection as the reversal and reparation of all the sin that Jesus unjustly suffered on the cross. Jesus dies under the unjust judgment of humans, and is raised by the just judgment of God. Jesus’ reward, or inheritance, of the covenantal blessings applies to the rest of humanity if by the power of the Holy Spirit we participate in His death (through remorse) and participate in His resurrection (through repentance). So the gospel is not that “God substituted Himself to satisfy His own wrath,” which is not Biblical terminology. Again, the gospel is exactly what Paul says it is: “the good news that God has fulfilled His promises to our children in that He raised Jesus up from the dead” (Acts 13:32). And again, the gospel is that God’s covenantal promises to restore the world from Adam’s curse (the subject of the Old Testament) are fulfilled in Jesus’ resurrection (the subject of the New Testament).

But how exactly do the merits of Jesus’ death and resurrection apply to us? We participate in Jesus’ death and resurrection through remorse and repentance for our sin. An offender feels remorse when he puts himself in his victim’s shoes and, through empathy, mentally and emotionally suffers his own offense against himself as his victim suffered it. This type of remorse is required for an offender to apologize to his victim. Notice also that this remorse is a fulfillment of the priority of retribution, that is, a suffering of one’s own sin against oneself, but internally in the soul rather than merely externally enduring physical punishment. Remorse is what the cross should cause in us. When we look to the cross, we the offenders should put ourselves in the shoes of our victim, Jesus, and suffer (in an internal sense) our crucifixion of him as crucifixion of our sinful selves. We are then “crucified with Christ” (Gal 2:20) and have “died with Christ” (Rom 6:8) and our sin is “condemned in the flesh” (Rom 8:3). When we die in Christ in this way, we are also able to rise to new life in Christ, for His unjust death has merited for us the reversal of death in His resurrection.

This restoration based logic emphasizes important things penal substitution overlooks or de-emphasizes, such as the self-destructive nature of sin, the death of Jesus at the hands of sinners, the fulfillment of God’s covenantal promises in Jesus’ resurrection, and the necessity of our participation in Jesus’ death and resurrection by undergoing a death and resurrection ourselves.

 

You say "Jesus did not die with us He died for us and it is after we turn in faith to Him that we then have our old man die with Him. Romans 6."

If we die with him, then he dies with us. Either way, that is not substitution.

A substitute is someone who does something instead of you, in your place so you do not have to do that thing.

Jesus does not die so we won't have to. Jesus dies so we can die with him and in him. See attached on all the verses that substitution does not fit with.

 

Romans 6: Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin.

This is one of my favorite passages. I don't see substitution anywhere in here. In fact, substitution is a completely misleading word to describe what is going on here. I see being crucified with Christ (or co-crucified as Galatians 2 would have it).

A substitute does not say "you will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with my baptism." A substitute does not say "follow me."

 

Love it. Payment (ransom) is not punishment though. Jesus pays our debt of obedience. He is not punished in our place.