More extracts from early church fathers and others

[DaveXR650]

I provided Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Origen,. etc stating that the cross was Christ unjustly suffering Satan's wrath. You guys ignored that and kept misrepresenting them because - like me - they used phrases you can use in your theology as well.

No one is saying that the ECF's didn't say a lot about the atonement that was not PSA. But once again, what they said is what they said, and if we find things that do indicate PSA we legitimately can point that out. What you are trying to do is position this that unless the only thing they said was PSA then PSA cannot be considered at all. Based on that argument, John Owen did not believe in PSA.

 

[JonC]

I could be projecting it. And you could be projecting it too. We all agree, the guys you post, the sources I use, everyone agrees on this: the early church did not articulate a systematic explanation of the atonement, nor have a unified position on it.

Not having a systematic framework does not mean not having a belief. They literally said Jesus suffered Satan's wrath. He bore our sins.

And with the other comment, the one you said I have no right to say what it means....that was MY statement about MY belief (it was not an early church quote).


The Early Church did have a unified belief on the Atonement. Can you provide even one that wrote Jesus suffered the punishment of God on the cross? No. Because they viewed Jesus as suffering the wrath of Satan.

Not having or needing a framework does not mean they were fools trying to hold together contradicting ideas.

 

[JonC]

No one is saying that the ECF's didn't say a lot about the atonement that was not PSA. But once again, what they said is what they said, and if we find things that do indicate PSA we legitimately can point that out. What you are trying to do is position this that unless the only thing they said was PSA then PSA cannot be considered at all. Based on that argument, John Owen did not believe in PSA.

But what they wrote DOES NOT indicate PSA because they DEFINED their belief.

Jesus bore our sins, He took our penalty upon Himself, He suffered and died on the cross, experiencing the wrath of Satan - Satan was unjust in punishing Him as He was without sin.

The only way their words meant PSA is if you assume they were saying Jesus suffered the punishment of God.

You do not have the right to assume. They told you what they meant by this penalty.


1. You extract quotes that, alone, could be PSA, or could be Satisfaction Theory, or could be Substitution Theory, or could be the Classic view, or could be any view.

2. You say it proves PSA because you agree with the quote (we all agree with the quote).

3. But you completely ignore that they have defined the terms of what you quote of them. You ignore that they have defined the penalty as Satan's wrath.

I cannot accept that you do not realize what you are doing, and that it is not honest to their words. You are not a foolish person. You want them, for some strange reason, to believe PSA.

 

[Martin Marprelate]

The Early Church did have a unified belief on the Atonement. Can you provide even one that wrote Jesus suffered the punishment of God on the cross? No. Because they viewed Jesus as suffering the wrath of Satan.

I don't know how you can write such nonsense with a straight face! But as you steadfastly refuse to engage with any of the texts that I posted on the O.P., here are some of them again:

1. Clement of Rome. 'In love the Ruler took us to Himself. Because of the love He had towards us, Jesus Christ gave His blood for us by the will of God; His flesh for our flesh, His life for our lives.'
'By the will of God.' Isaiah 53:10. 'Yet it was God's will for Him to suffer; He has put Him to grief.'

3. Epistle to Diognetus. 'No, He did not hate us, or discard us, or remember our wrongs; He exercised forbearance and long-suffering! In mercy, of His own accord, lifted up the burden of our sins! Of His own accord He gave us His Son as a ransom for us, the Guiltless for the guilty, the Innocent for the wicked, the Incorruptible for the corruptible, the Immortal for the mortal.'
The writer is spelling out the Great Exchange - 1,400 years before Luther! - how what was the sinner's in terms of punishment and death became Christ's. And who is it who arranged this? God Himself, exactly as Isaiah 53 says.

5. Origen. 'In the most recent times, God has manifested His righteousness and given Christ to be our redemption. He has made Him to be our propitiator ... for God is just, and therefore could not justify the unjust. Therefore He required the intervention of a propitiator, so that by having faith in Him, those who could not be justified by their own works might be justified.'
Who has given Christ? Who has required a propitiator, and who has given our Lord to be that propitiator? Why did He require a propitiator? Because, 'God is just, and therefore could not justify the unjust.' Why can He not justify the unjust? Becuase, 'He cannot deny Himself.' Therefore we read, 'When You make His soul an offering for sin......'

6. Augustine of Hippo. 'Death is the effect of the curse; and all sin is cursed, whether it means the action which merits punishment, or the punishment that follows. Christ, though guiltless, took our punishment, that He might cancel our guilt, and do away with our punishment....... As He died in the flesh which He took in bearing our punishment, so also, while ever blessed in His own righteousness, He was cursed for our offenses in the death which He suffered in bearing our punishment.'
What is that but Penal Substitution?

You are obsessed with the idea of God punishing Christ. That is the basis of your "Penal Substitution theory" which you have made up. You may perhaps have refuted your own theory, but, for the umpteenth time, 'The doctrine of penal substitution states that God gave Himself in the Person of His Son to suffer instead of us the death, punishment and curse due to fallen humanity as the penalty for sin.' Hence you can (or should be able to) understand at the same time that 'It pleased the LORD to bruise Him. He has put Him to grief,' and the Lord Jesus saying, 'No one takes [My life] from Me, but I lay it down of Myself.' The cross is Father and Son working together to satisfy divine justice and at the same time to justify guilty sinners.

And lastly, there is no mention anywhere in any of these texts of the blasphemous idea that the devil should punish Christ. He was permitted to tempt Him, but to punish Him? Never!

 

[JonC]

But nobody has denied it was God's will to crush Him.

That you are now trying to say Origen believed PSA (after condemning him on other threads for his Ransom Theory) is telling.

“The devil was conquered by his own trophy of victory. The devil jumped for joy … by seducing the first man, he slew him; by slaying the last man [Christ], he lost the first from his snare…The devil jumped for joy when Christ died,; and by that very death of Christ the devil was overcome” - Augustine

[Isaiah 53] shows the unrighteous rage of the devil when he unleashed himself on our Savior. For although there was no sin found in His being according to the flesh, but that flesh remained sinless, the devil as if [Christ] were a sinner killed Him. And in so doing manifested the totality of his wickedness. But for this very reason, salvation came for those who had fallen into sin.” Theodore of Heraclea

"What is the justice, therefore, by which the devil was conquered? What, unless the justice of Jesus Christ? And how was he conquered? Because, although he found in Him nothing worthy of death, yet he slew Him. And it is certainly just that the debtors, whom he held, should be set free, since they believed in Him whom he slew without any debt. It is in this way, then, that we are said to be justified by His blood.” - Augustine


You are extracting from the Early Church what you can conform to your theory and ignoring how they defined those statements.

 

[Martin Marprelate]

And here are a few more quotes to consider:

“The devil was conquered by his own trophy of victory. The devil jumped for joy … by seducing the first man, he slew him; by slaying the last man [Christ], he lost the first from his snare…The devil jumped for joy when Christ died,; and by that very death of Christ the devil was overcome” Augustine

“When He became incarnate and was made man, He began anew the long line of human beings. And He furnished us…with salvation – so that what we had lost in Adam, namely, to be in the image and likeness of God, we might recover in Christ Jesus. Irenaeus

“This is Crist, who, as the Mediator of the two, puts on man so that He may lead them to the Father. What man is, Christ was willing to be – so that man may also be what Christ is.” Cyprian

“He desired to re-create that Adam by means of the weak, and to bring aid to His entire creation. He accomplished these things through the birth of His Son Jesus Christ, Our Lord.” Victorinus

“Our Lord Jesus Christ endured man’s condition on our behalf, so that He could destroy all sin and furnish was with the provision necessary for our entrance into eternal life.” Phileas

“As we have said, when the body of the Lord was hung upon the cross, the tombs were opened, Hades was unlocked, the dead received life again, and the souls were sent back again into the world. For the Lord had conquered Hades, had trodden down death, and had covered the enemy with shame.” Alesander of Alexandria

“He submitted to death, purchasing us back by His own blood from him who had got us into his power, sold under sin.” Origen

“For my no other means cold we have attained to incorruptibility and immortality, unless we had been united to incorruptibility and immortality. But how could we be joined to incorruptibility and mortality – unless, first, incorruptibility and immortality had become that which we are, so that the corruptible might be swallowed up in incorruptibility.” Irenaeus

“What is the justice, therefore, by which the devil was conquered? What, unless the justice of Jesus Christ? And how was he conquered? Because, although he found in Him nothing worthy of death, yet he slew Him. And it is certainly just that the debtors, whom he held, should be set free, since they believed in Him whom he slew without any debt. It is in this way, then, that we are said to be justified by His blood.” Augustine

“Because of the love He had for us, Jesus Christ our Lord gave His blood for us by the will of God. He gave His flesh for our flesh, and His soul for our souls.” Clement of Rome

“We were not helped by His original life, sunk as we were in sin. Therefore, He came down into our deadness in order that, He having died to sin, we might then receive the life of His that is forever. For we bear about in our body the dying of Jesus.” Origen

“When our Lord arose from the place of the dead, and trampled death under foot, and bound the strong one, and set man free, then the whole creation saw clearly that for man’s sake the Judge was condemned.” Melito

I mean Him who crucified my sin, along with him [Satan] who was the inventor of it. Christ has condemned all the deceit and malice of the devil under the feet of those who carry Him in their hearts.” Ignatius

“In the last times, the Son was made a man among men, and He re-formed the human race. However, He destroyed and conquered man’s enemy. So He gave to His handiwork victory against the adversary.” Irenaeus

“For the apostasy had obtained dominion over us at the beginning, when it insatiably snatched away what was not its own. Now, Christ did not do this by violent means, but by the means of persuasion. This is becoming to God of counsel, who does not use violent means to obtain what He desires. In this manner, neither would justice be infringed upon, nor would the ancient handiworks of God to destruction.” Irenaeus.

“In this manner, the Lord has redeemed us through His own blood, giving His soul for our souls, and His flesh for our flesh. He also poured out the Spirit of the Father for the union and communion of God and man, actually imparting God to men by means of the Spirit. On the other hand, He has joined man to God by His own incarnation. And He will truly and lastingly bestow immorality upon us at His second coming – through communion with God.” Irenaeus

“In His work of recapitulation, He has summed up all things. He has waged war against our enemy. He has crushed him who had in the beginning led us away captives in Adam, and trampled upon his head.” Irenaeus

Apart from the very first quotation, I see no mention of anyone claiming that the devil killed Christ, and in fact Augustine is considerably later than the other whom @JonC mentions.
Some of thse I disagree with - I am not a fan of Irenaeus' 'recaptitulation theory' - but I don't think that any of them (apart from the first) disagree with the doctrine of penal substitution.

The chap I hadn't heard of before is Melitus. I have discovered that he was a 2nd Century Church Father and I found this extract from one of his recently-discovered writings, which is a powerful exposition of the Deity of Christ, but says nothing, one way or the other, about PSA. It comes from James White's book, The Forgotten Trinity:

And so he was lifted up upon a tree and an inscription was attached indicating who was being killed. Who was it? It is a grievous thing to tell, but a most fearful thing to refrain from telling. But listen, as you tremble before him on whose account the earth trembled! He who hung the earth in place is hanged. He who fixed the heavens in place is fixed in place. He who made all things fast is made fast on a tree. The Sovereign is insulted. God is murdered. The King of Israel is destroyed by an Israelite hand. This is the One who made the heavens and the earth, and formed mankind in the beginning, The One proclaimed by the Law and the Prophets, The One enfleshed in a virgin, The One hanged on a tree, The One buried in the earth, The One raised from the dead and who went up into the heights of heaven, The One sitting at the right hand of the Father, The One having all authority to judge and save, Through Whom the Father made the things which exist from the beginning of time. This One is “the Alpha and the Omega,” This One is “the beginning and the end” . . . the beginning indescribable and the end incomprehensible. This One is the Christ. This One is the King. This One is Jesus. This One is the Leader. This One is the Lord. This One is the One who rose from the dead. This One is the One sitting on the right hand of the Father. He bears the Father and is borne by the Father. “To him be the glory and the power forever. Amen.”​

 

[JonC]

James White was not a member of the Eary Church.

You are ignoring that you just called the Early Church writers you quote as blasphemous.

EVERY Christian believes Christ was obedient to God's will, that it was God's predetermined plan.

You are dishonest to quote the Early Church writings, exclude where they define the punishment Christ endured as Satan's wrath, and claim their statements EVERY Christiam believes is your theory.

“The devil was conquered by his own trophy of victory. The devil jumped for joy … by seducing the first man, he slew him; by slaying the last man [Christ], he lost the first from his snare…The devil jumped for joy when Christ died,; and by that very death of Christ the devil was overcome” - Augustine

[Isaiah 53] shows the unrighteous rage of the devil when he unleashed himself on our Savior. For although there was no sin found in His being according to the flesh, but that flesh remained sinless, the devil as if [Christ] were a sinner killed Him. And in so doing manifested the totality of his wickedness. But for this very reason, salvation came for those who had fallen into sin.” Theodore of Heraclea

"What is the justice, therefore, by which the devil was conquered? What, unless the justice of Jesus Christ? And how was he conquered? Because, although he found in Him nothing worthy of death, yet he slew Him. And it is certainly just that the debtors, whom he held, should be set free, since they believed in Him whom he slew without any debt. It is in this way, then, that we are said to be justified by His blood.” - Augustine

 

[easternstar]

James White was not a member of the Eary Church.

You are ignoring that you just called the Early Church writers you quote as blasphemous.

EVERY Christian believes Christ was obedient to God's will, that it was God's predetermined plan.

You are dishonest to quote the Early Church writings, exclude where they define the punishment Christ endured as Satan's wrath, and claim their statements EVERY Christiam believes is your theory.

“The devil was conquered by his own trophy of victory. The devil jumped for joy … by seducing the first man, he slew him; by slaying the last man [Christ], he lost the first from his snare…The devil jumped for joy when Christ died,; and by that very death of Christ the devil was overcome” - Augustine

[Isaiah 53] shows the unrighteous rage of the devil when he unleashed himself on our Savior. For although there was no sin found in His being according to the flesh, but that flesh remained sinless, the devil as if [Christ] were a sinner killed Him. And in so doing manifested the totality of his wickedness. But for this very reason, salvation came for those who had fallen into sin.” Theodore of Heraclea

"What is the justice, therefore, by which the devil was conquered? What, unless the justice of Jesus Christ? And how was he consaid verse does not do thatquered? Because, although he found in Him nothing worthy of death, yet he slew Him. And it is certainly just that the debtors, whom he held, should be set free, since they believed in Him whom he slew without any debt. It is in this way, then, that we are said to be justified by His blood.” - Augustine

You will never get a PSA fanatic to admit they are wrong because if they did their whole house-of-cards made-up theology would crumble. They don't even use scripture honestly. When confronted with what Isaiah 53 actually says, as I did when I showed that a contrast was given by using the word 'but', correcting the impression that God smote and afflicted Christ, they quote verse 10 to supposedly reinforce their error, clearly ignoring that the verse does not do that because they clearly and conveniently totally ignore the contrast in verse 5, and willfully fail to interpret verse 10 in light of the verse that came before -- verse 5.
PSA fanatics are not honest; therefore, it is not possible to have an honest discussion with one. They twist scripture, ignore it, take it out of context, and then do the same with other writings such as that of the ECF. Doing that, you can make the Bible and other writings say whatever you want. You can even invent new doctrines like Calvin and Luther did.

 

[JonC]

You will never get a PSA fanatic to admit they are wrong because if they did their whole house-of-cards made-up theology would crumble.

I agree. But the weird thing is they now accept the Early Church as holding PSA, which means PSA - and their entire theology by extention - is meaningless.

Decades ago the argument was that the Early Church misunderstood as they were at the beginning of, rather than able to view, theological developments.

But today the PSA crowd are willing to completely ignore the Early Church writings that define their statements to find a common view that does not exist.

How many times have the early church writings been quoting showing that they believed the penalty Christ suffered for our sins was the penalty Satan demanded, and Christ was a representative substitute (a "Second Adam", the "human line made anew")?

How many times have their writings shown they believed Christ's blood cleanses us from all righteousness rather than paying a debt of sin?

At least 10, probably closer to 20.

Yet they will continue to provide quotes of common Christian belief, provide their own definitions and ignore the Early Church definitions.


I disagree with the older position (theological development arrived at the right conclusion). But at least they were honest and respected the early Christians enough to allow their beliefs to be expressed.

 

[JonC]

No one is saying that the ECF's didn't say a lot about the atonement that was not PSA. But once again, what they said is what they said, and if we find things that do indicate PSA we legitimately can point that out.

Here is the problem.

The DID say Christ suffered a penalty.

BUT they also said that the penalty Christ suffers was the unjust wrath of Satan.

You see the first statement and claim that held PSA along with other views.

But viewing Christ suffering a penalty AND this penalty being Satan's wrath is not PSA.


If I did that to you....if I extracted some of your words I could prove you are a Jehovah Witness who believes other ideas as well.

I would not do that to you, because it is wrong and dishonest. I would challenge anybody who did that to you because it would be wrong and dishonest.

The ONLY difference is you can also call out the dishonesty while these early saints cannot.

Now, do I believe their doctrine was correct on everything? Absolutely not. BUT I will allow their words to speak for them even when I hold a different view.

 

[DaveXR650]

The DID say Christ suffered a penalty.

BUT they also said that the penalty Christ suffers was the unjust wrath of Satan.

There is where you are making a fundamental mistake. You could claim that in some cases, maybe, but in others the suffering of Christ was clearly propitiatory towards God as the wronged party as in the case I showed on the other thread with Origen.

What you are doing is demanding that we put a level of theological unity on the ECF's which they simply did not have. They, as well as Augustine and the Reformers had multiple things to say about the atonement. Some right, some clearly wrong, some unknown to us as to their veracity.

 

[JonC]

There is where you are making a fundamental mistake. You could claim that in some cases, maybe, but in others the suffering of Christ was clearly propitiatory towards God as the wronged party as in the case I showed on the other thread with Origen.

What you are doing is demanding that we put a level of theological unity on the ECF's which they simply did not have. They, as well as Augustine and the Reformers had multiple things to say about the atonement. Some right, some clearly wrong, some unknown to us as to their veracity.

You are defining propitiation wrong. The word is reconciliation (literally). "Propitiation is a much later word (no early Christian used the word as it did not exist ..same with "atonement").

That said, you are missing an important fact. Christ propitiating as our High Priest , our Mediator, our Advocate, is Christ Himself as the Propitiation.

That quote is not related to PSA but to Origen's already stated beliefs. It is Christ as the Second Adam, this is how we escaoe the wrath to come.

It is all Christ. It is reconciliation accomplished on the cross by His blood shed for us.