Sunday, July 11, 2021

 Billionaire Blast Off: A Sunday Sermon

Rev. Dr. Douglas Olds

July 11, 2021


The Earth is God's intended vessel for humanity to sail the living cosmos.  

Billionaire Richard Branson launched himself into space today, immersed in a vanity competition with fellow billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to commercialize space flight.  The Bible lifts up the virtues (esp. loyalty, patience, and quietness) subject to contempt by these atmosphere-assaulting blast offs of private spectacle and vice.

    Eccl 1.4 is a key text for directing conscience toward loyalty to the earth and our given place on it. The claim that the earth remains לְעוֹלָ֥ם (leʿôlām: “forever”) may signify either an eternal status for this aeon’s terra firma, or it may involve the vestiges of recollection of a terrain’s material agency in an individual’s existence that is networked into soul. Human loyalty accommodates, communes with, and commits to the terrain and atmosphere encountered during its earthly walk. There is no evidence that such a sustaining terrain and atmosphere exist for humanity in outer space so that we can trash this planet’s sustaining processes to get there. The lure of outer space is a deadly illusion tailored for our idolatrous age. Contrary to Elon Musk's assertion, outer space doesn't represent humanity's hope. Outer Space wants our death. Mars wants our death. Those devoted to and swallowed up by mammon demonstrate the idolatrous lure of self-exaltation that brings death.

      Isa. 30.15: “in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.” (Cf. the command to silence in Hab. 2:20 and Zech. 1:7). Silence and patience are aligned and life-giving virtues that counter the political economy of combustion-fueled haste and its ubiquitous, roaring din of engines. In quietness is not so much the absence of activity as the overflowing and healing presence of the Divine.

    Planet busting, death-dealing noise and heat (from aerospace combustion) are linked, in contrast with stillness and shade:

Isa. 25.5: The noise of aliens like heat in a dry place, 

    you subdued the heat with the shade of clouds; 

    the song of the ruthless was stilled. 

    Loyalty to planet and place is an eschatological (restoration) virtue, the shalom in re-localization.The latter loyalty counters the commercialized promotion of exoticism, escapism, long-distance travel, and (the putative stabilization of global society by) the expansion of economic integration and scale through combustion-fueled long-distance, “free” trade in goods and services.  

Mic. 4:3–4 (cf. 1 Ki. 5.5) speaks of this restoration virtue embedded in place:

  3He shall judge between many peoples, 
  and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; 
  they shall beat their swords into plowshares, 
  and their spears into pruning hooks; 
  nation shall not lift up sword against nation, 
  neither shall they learn war any more; 
  4but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees.

Loyalty to place is distinguished from and excludes nationalism which tends to idolatry and suspicion of outsiders, to militarism, and to loss of recollection of relationship and the operations of reciprocity, mutuality and shalom situated in the local. Loyalty to place is based, like all virtues, on charity and hospitality fostered by proximity, familiarity, and intimacy. Cf. Prov. 27.10b.

    Loyalty to place functions teleologically to solidify treasured relationships and the communion of natural and social features. Loyalty to place recollects the spiritual marks of material agency in our eternal destinies. Time and duration of proximity cement the meaning, significance, and value and outlook of permanence for what was prior considered impermanent, mortal, or evanescent. Christians serve eternity in the here and now for the “new earth” by loyalty to planet and place, with local terrains and biomes becoming foci for bioregionalism that integrates and incorporates nature’s neglected agencies—animate as well as inanimate.

    The virtues of loyalty, patience, and quietness counter the haste and noise of our inner life (and their projection by us onto social and ambient reality). Virtue develops both character/soul and neighborhoods. Virtue is simultaneously concerned both with moral consequence and with the development of self-initiated direction and growth. In the best case, these atmospheric virtues can roll back the specter of the planet’s (or humanity’s) death. They provide the praxis for self-direction and continuation to live morally and ethically under an outlook of existential despair occasioned by inexorable environmental and political decay exemplified in these vain and vicious billionaires. By virtue we demonstrate our awareness that God does not die even if creatures do. And a Christian’s commitment to demonstrating to God that she will until the end implement goodness and strength of Christian character *on earth* as the result of God’s bringing faith, joy and neighborhood into her individual and social locations. Christian demonstration of this commitment strengthens religious systems and testifies to others in the church’s social location—its neighbors and society—that faith, purity, and freedom shape the understanding of God’s ongoing reality and presence in Christian lives.

    Whereas nature is endowed with resources and environmental capacities that could deliver material sufficiency to all, post-reformation Western Civilization has grounded its political economy on satisfying unmediated appetites for consumption and accumulation by those most willing and able to pay--luxuriating appetites that neither limit themselves to the Creator’s intent for nature nor for the needs for sharing by marginalized peoples and future generations including those of other species. The result is rampant injustices: gender injustice, racial injustice, class injustice, and intergenerational injustice in the contemporary distribution of benefits and costs of the carbon-intensive economy. The Western economy of promoting combustion-fueled material growth to satisfy the private preferences of vanity weighted by the wealthy's ability to pay has created a society in conflict with Jesus’s gospel of the Kingdom of God and the New Earth. 

    The “whole Creation is groaning” (Ro. 8.22) under the weight of intensive combustion's injustices and environmental imbalances derived from an economy of ashes organized to satisfy insatiable desires by Western wealthy and the satisfaction of their unjustified, private, and autonomous preferences.

    Time is short for human civilization to turn back ecosystem collapse from Global Heating and Climate Disruption, as well as diligently and sharply to focus its attention, in light of God’s judgment, on the social injustices and environmental degradation from and idolatry of transgressive political-economic systems. Perhaps it is too late for civilization, which does not in any way vitiate the need to live faithfully, for virtue will be tested and refined in the crucible of an increasingly fevered planet. The pursuit and embodiment of goodness knows no expiration.

The existential implications of human trusteeship inside nature and specifically of the atmosphere—and the imperatives to avoid (economic) idolatry--impel both the cultivation of the virtues and recognition of individual accountability. Accountability may be structured inside the divine immanent (as in the moral assessment of peers or the recollection of history) or transcendent (in one’s final destiny inside God’s eternal being assigned by the transcendent Christ). As the ethics of freedom, virtue brings individuals into alignment with divine reality and excellence, while accountability to the deep moral topography of processive revelation enlists the people of God into the applied work of maintaining the life-sustaining balances and cycles of the atmosphere and water-sustained biomes. Both in directive to virtue and trusteeship and in the teleological pursuit of well-ordered humanity and nature-based aesthetics, inscripturated morality for the aggregated people of God guides both individual lifestyle and social praxis for the fulfillment of the incarnate, sanctified cosmos as Christ becomes all-in-all (Col. 3.11).

  
 

Saturday, July 3, 2021

 Biblical Atonement is not Substitutionary Punishment

Rev. Dr. Douglas Olds

July 2021




ABSTRACT

The errors of the tradition deriving from Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo changed the early church’s understanding of the atonement from models of Christus Victor (expiation through supplication and sacrificial blood) or Ransom to the Devil (propitiation of Satan by the extension of God’s divine grace—it is Satan who ever requires a transaction) (on these early models of atonement, see esp. Aulén 1930).The 11th C Anselmic tradition of atonement makes foundational its transactional feudalism: the satisfaction of God’s consistent and primary righteous honor opposed against sin, a consistent righteousness that needs an outlet to appease (propitiate) is the necessary prelude to an ancillary revelation of grace.

Moreover, the substitutionary nature of appeasement is evident as the plan of Caiaphas to appease the Roman occupiers: John 11:50. The substitutionary, punitive atonement is thus a symbolic parallel of Caiaphas’s strategy to provide a sacrificial scapegoat and Pilate's as the proxy for the crucifying hegemonic power of brutality to align with Caiaphas's strategy to maintain control and coerce stability from the perspective of  elites.

 Extrapolating these errors--of transactional religion of substitutionary appeasement is an atonement that may only neutralize the overhang of wrath--brings forth religious tribalism making grace and power part of parochial politics and limited purviews, leading contemporary reactionary, culturally violent christians to increasinglty drift toward a role in the thymic, raging politics of retribution and exclusionary “purification” of  collectives looking to the Cross.  Such centering of retributive justice before grace betrays our Christian vocation as virtuous agents of Golden Rule deontology that reconciles estrangement and repairs from God’s good creative intent.

Read the Lord’s Prayer: Grace leads and grace crowns, while economic justice of Jubilee is an interlude.

A developmental, ever sanctifying Christology of open immanence [a term from Charles Taylor], while giving sufficient weight to the goodness of liberty, values earthly existence as intrinsically sacred and possible rather than deficient or doomed. It embraces diversity and aligns with grace by integration of the finite [for the how of this techne of heart—deontological virtue--see http://t.ly/PvMl] rather than sustaining a hierarchical, recurrent, or detached and defended boundary of a parochialized infinite.

By contrast, Platonic, ontic rootedness in an esse of eternal archetypes and individual participation by mind--epistemic noesis--does not provide a metaphysical foundation for universal or transformative unity, a conative will that involves both the goodness of human freedom set in concert and harmony with a comprehensive and integrating telos guiding human history toward unity of purpose and essence. An achieved and perfecting human essence that bridges the renewing earth and the divine. Neoplatonism’s transcendent church of closed absolutes grounded in knowing the mind of the Father exists to confirm all the priors of nostalgic orders.

The Cross of Christ reveals the divine actively and inclusively present within creation, its supplication and incarnated condescension of sin-expiating blood removing the need for appeasement to cross divine boundaries. Ethically, this revealed closeness of divine accompaniment as the divine essence (ousia) promotes deontological virtues centered on relational wholeness, healing, and cosmic repair rather than retributive justice. This encounters every aspect of creation as flowing from grace and human attendance to divine companionship and access rather than quaking in hierarchical and transactional tensions ("under wrath") with the divine. Or seeing others as intrinsically flawed with a limited horizon with that God. True unity in freedom is not found by sacrificial “participation”(cf. Hebrews 10:1-18 "once for all" sacrifice), noetic contemplation, chronic foreboding and fear, or instrumental virtues of rigid and transactional archetypes but in an inclusive journey guided by the Spirit, generating wholeness by the Shema’s receptive, whole-souled wisdom that reorders the will from the strategic noesis of reciprocal arrangements to the grounded absolute intention to love God by the Golden Rule.

Ideologies of atonement reveal a dialectic range—the Biblical primacy of expiation of judgement by the apotropaic dissolving of sin and the secondary condescension to immature human psychological needs for escaping the putative punitive wrath sin merits by instead propitiating an angry God by scapegoat substitution. The Christus Victor model of atonement primarily imaged as swallowing up sin by his blood and expiating death’s judgement by his supplication on the Cross. The bearing of violence upon Jesus' scapegoated person originates from secondary and deluded--not divine--causes.



---

Lambert (2016, 136): “Hebrews 2:17 says, ‘Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.’ Propitiation [sic: ἱλάσκεσθαι ] means that Jesus bore the weight of God’s wrath and paid the penalty for all sin.”[1]

“Propitiation” is a tendentious translation of the Greek word “hilasterion” word group. The translation “propitiation” directs us to the looming overhang of positive law’s punishment and the way human (ritual) acts can influence or turn away anger. When located in the initiative of humans, propitiation is a religious word that makes God’s acts contingent in some way on human actions or appeasement. Note how religious contingency is contrasted by Jesus (in Mark 2.27) with true worship: human sabbath observance is not a means of grace, but rather the sabbath is the grace delivered to humans on God’s free initiative. Moreover, natural law is admonitory while human positive law imposes violent consequences[2]

The alternative translation “expiation” focuses on God’s free initiative regarding judgment (Ex. 33.19) from the petitions of a worthy penitent.[3] Expiation is the cosmic effect of Christ’s supplication that finds favor with God based on close relationship and which removes those favored from impending judgment. The initiative in the case of the atonement is God’s free dispensation of grace that is both subjective and objectively merited by the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross.

The substitutionary sacrifice is rather Christ’s voluntary solidarity with humanity draws off the judgment of sin as prefigured by God’s instructions to send the goat into the wilderness in Lev. 16.22.[4] This goat is not “punished” nor is it a propitiation of God--a human act intended to turn aside wrath. It may be propitiatory in a pagan religious sense—an animal sent out to “propitiate” the desert spirit (the goat “for Azazel”[5] [Lev. 16:8]). It is more likely that this ritual conceptualizes sin as a physical infection where the sacrificial animal receives the contagion through ritual transfer and is then dispatched to the wilderness to apotropaically draw off and purge into the void the sin of the Israelites, a mystery that assuages their consciences by the grace of God’s ordained ritual of abandonment (see discussion of wrath, above). The substitutionary (solidarity) character of this sacrifice has parallels with the Aqeda—the binding and contemplated sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham which finds its substitute in a ram located in the thicket nearby. The goat in Lev. 16.22 (in expiation that purges the holy place); the ram in the Aqeda (in familial substitution); Judah’s sacrificial pledge of redemption for Benjamin (Gen. 44.32-4); and the Passover lamb (in Ex. 13.11-16)[6] that substitutes for the first-born of the people of God and commemorates redemption from slavery, taken together, provide the ritual and family contexts of (redeeming substitutionary expiatory) sacrifice in the OT.[7]

The way of the Cross—Christ’s expiation of judgment (John 12.31-33ff; prefigured by the High Priest in Num. 16.46-48) is terrible to contemplate. By the Cross, Jesus crosses over the void to make the costly entry into the eschatological temple (Ezekiel 40-48), and by his resurrection returns to lead his followers into its places (John 14.3) of refuge in God’s gracious presence. His expiation of judgement through sacrifice and solidarity has ongoing, hypostatic union efficacy even now,[8] assuming we continue to confess and repent.

Sacrifice transfers a gift offered to God from common space to God's sacred place but which first passes through the liminal space of death, purifying it by shaking off or dispersing what is impure. Sacrifice thus has a "direction" and a mechanism prefigured in the OT (see below). Jesus' sacrifice culminates in God's sacred place, heaven. This direction of sacrifice is not a mechanism for punishment, rather it serves for purification and expiation of judgement.[9]

Psalm 51:19 speaks of “right sacrifices.” It is my belief that reading Jesus’s substitutionary sacrifice dialectically—primarily as expiatory and secondarily as psychologically propitiatory--is the proper religious understanding from the dual natures of Christ. The human Son propitiates the Father as only a sinless one could, and as divine and sinless he can expiate (the judgment of) sin by his perfect blood.[10] On the Cross, Jesus expresses simultaneously and efficaciously the ultimate loyalty to God and love of neighbor. By contrast, “religion” of the human propitiatory type is part of what some contemporaries of Jesus taught--that by their rigor and elaborate rituals of purity (e.g. Mk. 2.16) they could induce God to act contingently and reciprocally toward them. However, righteous religion involves those observances that demonstrate not self-actualized or -initiated worthiness, but rather is the revealed vehicle of God’s mercy (Luke 18:9-14) that allows us—as redeemed people--to draw near to him in fellowship through prayer, virtue, and right sacrifice (including acts of confession, love, mercy, and praise).[11]

Jesus’ forsakenness on the Cross seems to me better interpreted as the desolating experience (begun in the agony at Gethsemane) of the expiation of judgement (judgement’s eclipse)[12] in a temporary, isolated and God-voided desert than by how Lambert (2016, 145) proposes, as Jesus’ “payment of penalty” of God’s wrathful physical violence against Jesus’ body. In OT times, it is the Adversary who has the initiative and prerogative to inflict bodily suffering (Job 2.4-7. Cf. the unrighteous witness of Zophar the Naamathite in Job 20 positing God’s putative punishment of his creatures). Is a penalty of the kind luridly depicted in Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ how God treats his creatures or his Son after the Son’s Sermon on the Mount? If we agree that the anointed servant in Isaiah 42 is the divine Son, we see in v. 3 his divine agency that is radically non-violent and gentle in the ministry of justice that sets the world aright:  A bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice.

How then is God the Father any different in the era(s) of his messiah?

While wrath is attested by various Biblical texts to loom over the unrighteous (Rom. 2.8),[13] none of the texts picture or propose physical violence and battery against the body with God as the source. Jesus’s parables discuss exclusion, outer darkness, fire that never is extinguished, and the worm that will never die, but no text pictures wrath acted on the body of creatures by means of Imperial brutality except that of piercing. Empires may be God’s agents, but Isaiah notes how they exceed and transgress their warrant in punishing rebellious Israel excessively and brutally (Isa. 47.6).

“Propitiation” may have a secondary function in the “hilasterion” texts as a way of attributing the primary cause of Jesus’s suffering—God (per Lambert 2016, 239)--but that the main meaning in Salvation history is “expiation.” By this mystery, God’s judgment is held in abeyance at the Cross by the supreme faithfulness of Christ’s expiatory sacrifice and in the words of forgiveness on the Cross to comfort humanity--and by the purgative exchange of his blood—an exchange from our life’s contagion into his blood’s purity. By taking on humanity’s sin, Christ has turned aside divine judgement by mitigating sin’s contagion. He bore our infirmities away from us to purge them in emptiness (what Genesis and Isaiah term “tohu”) by the holiness and purity of his blood (Col. 1.20). To the extent he was scourged and suffered the crown of thorns and the suffering of Crucifixion, God is the primary—ultimate--cause, while the temple-imperial complex was the efficient cause (per Acts 4:27–28). Based on the analogy with the Assyrian emperor’s assault on Israel and Satan’s torment of Job’s body, the primary cause is God (Job 42.11b) directing these secondary agents who tragically exceed their warrant in bodily affliction. The atoning sacrificial mechanism is expiation of sin by blood and death’s judgement by victorious, perfect life. Atonement involves the paramount secondary victim revealing himself the primary victor. Its substitutions are organic and transformative, manifesting the ontology and processes of Creation, not passive or violent. Imagining the atonement as punitively violent matters to the (lack of) temporal success in imaging and bringing about shalom in church-directed spheres and mission.[14] Atonement in the comprehensive biblical witness does not prioritize punitive substitution.

A key text supporting the dialectic of the divine and popular interpretations of atonement is Isa. 53.4: “Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.” Note that it is “we” (Israel’s people) who consider him punished, while the prophet contrasts how the servant of God bears our pain and suffering (Ex. 34.7) with that of a popular, but erroneous, attribution of “punishment.” Isa. 53.4 does not support the doctrine of punitive substitutionary atonement,[15] and the concept of “propitiation” as turning away wrath may derive from v. 10’s link of the servant’s affliction with God’s will to make him a “reparation offering” prefigured in Leviticus 1-7.

Contrary to Lambert (2016, 139) finding punitive penalty in 1 Peter 2:24, that verse needs to be read in this context of Isa. 53.4 and the earlier 1 Pe 1.19., neither of which mention punishment or penalty but are focused, as I am emphasizing, on Christ’s bearing our infirmities and the substitutionary sacrificial atonement in the effective mechanism of his blood. The finding of penalty in 1 Peter seems to me eisegesis from previous doctrinal commitments or psychological need. The English word “punishment” in Isa. 53.5 for the Hebrew מוּסָר (mûsār) may not be the most apt. The LXX most often translates this Hebrew word as “paduein” (discipline or correction), and when מוּסָר (mûsār) does carry the connotation of “punishment,” its semantic field reveals it is “Instruction through punishment, which is intended to be remedial.”[16]  God’s justice is remedial NOT punitive.

However, the atonement points to the penalty for transgressions of the OT law codes that called for death: intentional homicide, sexual crimes, and religious crimes against God. While other crimes in the OT did not involve a bodily punishment, such as property crimes that warranted financial penalty as well as other sins that were not to subject to literal punishment except by the lex talionis (Schnittjer 2017, Session 14) that Jesus’ gospel ministry at the Sermon on the Mount had annulled (Matt. 5:38-42). If Jesus by his Word had annulled the lex talionis, how was it in effect at the Cross? The punishment inflicted on Jesus’s body must be seen as the result of injustice by humanity under the influence of the false impersonating of the primary cause, namely the devil and its injustice. While the sacrificial death of Jesus is part of God’s plan for advancing Salvation history, I am not convinced that suffering divine violence as “penalty” is the best descriptor of Jesus’ atoning work.

That some prefer “propitiation of punishment” versus “expiation of judgment” through Christ’s sacrifice may reflect the differences in psychological makeups regarding the need for a substitutionary stand in for the violent penalty that our sin merits in Torah codes.[17] A care seeker who holds to the need for propitiation could be redirected from fear of supernatural agents which hold humanity in bondage (by anxiety at the prospect of physical brutality against the body) to the liberating power of Christ’s atonement that brings spiritual peace and bodily security.

The atonement (which is Christ’s work on the Cross, the becoming “at one” with humanity in the mission of God) culminates with a substitutionary sacrifice in that Jesus offers himself in our place—to draw off our sin (by righteously taking on [becoming] humanity’s sin [2 Cor. 5.21]) which we are unable to do--and it is atoning by this process of expiation. It is not punitive substitutionary atonement.[18] Christ as the spotless Lamb is necessary for the solution to the chronic problem of human sin (which eschatologically merits punishment), but the Cross is an expiation interval that not only dissolves the sin—into the void of death--of those who trust in Christ as their Lord and Savior, but also redeems us from the power of sin and enslavement to elemental spirits (Gal. 4.3,8; Col. 2.8, 20), our participation in sinful structural systems that inhibit the realization of the Kingdom of God. The “lutron” Greek word complex (e.g. Mt. 20.28) and its cognates supports the “ransom” (functional cf. 4 Macc. 17.21-22) versus a “payment of penalty” aspect of Christ’s work. We are liberated from sin by Christ’s redemptive work (cf. Isa. 44.22-3). The punitive violence that Jesus suffered, like that of the first Christian martyr Stephen (Acts 7.54-60), came at human hands—not directly of God, but from the enmeshed temple and imperial establishments enslaved to violent elements and so indeed from the complicit agency of all humanity born into the same slavery and sinful systems (Ps. 51:5).

Finally, punishment is excluded from the agency of God, which is fear-negating love, in 1 John 4.18.  A word study of κόλασις [punishment] demonstrates that it is primarily encompassed in non-canonical texts, and specifically is a feature of intertestamental literature (BDAG 2000, 555). The other NT use of this cognate is Mt. 25.46. Such eternal punishment is not propitiation as it is delivered as a final judgement.  Such a fate is expiated by Jesus’s sacrifice for those who trust in its merits and efficacious purity, and there is no religious venue or temporal perspective for punishment’s eternal aspect. Punishment is therefore not propitiated in the Biblical witness.

Exploration of a care seeker’s sense of guilt for sin (and perhaps even against Christ) follows on these considerations, and the sacrificial atonement’s assuaging messages may restore functional vocation and family life through wise and companionable counseling that brings forth the Gospel message of forgiveness and redemption, freeing us from our recurrent anxieties.



[1] A text pointing to wrath is Lam. 3.1. The concluding prepositional phrase בְּשֵׁ֖בֶט עֶבְרָתֽוֹ contains some grammatical ambiguities regarding agency or source. It can be read dialectically as an attribution of source represented by the metonomy of God’s scepter (“rod”), which elsewhere refers to a tribal group. God’s anger (noted in Lamentations 2) is in 3.1 executed by “his rod,” almost certainly by the secondary cause, human agents among whom God exercises the sovereignty of the scepter. Moreover, it is likely a mistake to read Lamentations 3 Christologically. The receiver of “his” (or “its” [the scepter’s]) wrath in 3.1 is linked to a conscious object whose bones are broken, a condition from which the Messiah is excluded (Psalm 34:20 prefigured in Exod. 12.36; Num. 9.12).

Lamentation chs. 2 and 3 are, like Isaiah 38 (and Psalm 51?) referring to the human result of localized violent conquest, not an application of divine violence onto the person of the Messiah.

[2] Kreeft 2009, lecture 12.

[3]Mordecai’s instruction to Esther (4.8) to make “supplication” to Xerxes in the face of Haman’s edict for Jewish eradication grammatically illustrates how such supplication foreshadows Christ’s cosmic expiation.  The hiṯpaʿʿēl infinitive  לְהִֽתְחַנֶּן־ל֛וֹ highlights both the subject and the object of the piel intensive form of the verbal root nn, with a primary meaning “’be gracious,’ being used almost exclusively in the derived sense, ‘show favor,’ … found in Gk. Cháris [grace], the word most often used to translate ḥēn in the LXX… The hithpael means ‘seek favor,’ mainly the favor of God… nn is used of favor shown in personal relationships; it can refer to ordinary acceptance or kindness, or else favor of a special nature, such as pity, mercy, or generosity… In all cases nn is a positive term. It is inconceivable that one can be angry and at the same time show favor. Nor can one receive favor from someone who is at the same time angry. Favor cannot coexist with judgment. It is given or withdrawn according to whether one is positively disposed toward another” (Freedman, D. N., Lundbom, J. R., & Fabry, H.-J. חָנַן. (TDOT V, 1986, 22-24 emph. added). “’Supplication’…is a God-given gift (1QH 9:11; 11:34). The ability to ‘supplicate’ is itself a demonstration of God’s favor” (Ibid., 36), hence Esther 4.8’s hithpael verb indicates a middle voice (a cooperation of primary and secondary causations) and the piels’ intensification under conditions of this middle aspect. The hithpael of ḥnn indicates the divine source of grace that makes Esther’s supplication effective by virtue of her own heart of grace. Through fasting and humiliation, Esther exposed herself to social power and entreated God so God would deliver the people. Christ’s supplication intensified beyond these by his divine essence in grace, his relationship with the Father, and the atoning sacrificial mechanisms discussed, bringing forth into history the expiation of judgment of sin-jeopardized peoples.

While love can co-exist with judgment, favor nn cannot.  Thus, expiation is the cosmic effect of Christ’s supplication.

[4] Cf. the purging of blood-guilt by dispersion of the people in Ezek. 22.13-17. Also: the collection and physical dispersion of the people’s wickedness by God’s agents for relocation in Shinar [Babel/Babylonia] (Zech. 5-6-11).

[5] Azaz’el (עזזאל) appends the name of the chief god El to the ‘Semitic root ע.ז.ז, meaning to be “enraged,” “fierce,” or “strong,”’ an etiological attribution of divine wrath. --https://www.thetorah.com/article/is-azazel-a-goat-place-demon-or-deity

[6] By the principle of a fortiori, Christ as sacrifice accomplishes far more in the NT than these OT acts. (See John 1.29, 35; 1 Cor 5.7; Heb. 9.25-6; Rom. 3.25a). Christ’s sacrifice is a cosmic atonement that includes expiation, purging, cleansing, propitiatory, and reparation/redemption functions.

[7] The place of the Aqeda is stated to be Mt. Moriah in 2 Chron. 3.1, the site of the Temple Mount nearby to Golgotha (Schnittjer 2017), a geographical parallel that prefigures the typology of sacrificial substitution--of the ram for the people embodied in the hope of the promised child Isaac--and the sacrifice of the promised child Jesus as a substitute for the people.

[8] “Jesus’s taking on sinful flesh (Rom 8:3) and expediting the curse (Gal 3-4) is an act of solidarity and union (“cursed solidarity” [by the hypostatic union] if you like). No substitution detected [in these texts].” --Andrew Rillera @AndrewRillera 10/02/21. In experiencing the curse, Jesus acts to expiate it by prayer, forgiveness, and the mechanism of blood atonement that redeems the capital demands of Satan (see below).

[9] Whereas Jer. 26.16; Ezek. 29.4-5; Amos 4.2; Hab. 1.14-17 notes that people are caught like fish to face judgment, Mark 1.17 reverses this image in terms of the Gospel call, absent, at this point, of atonement theology other than the allusion in prior verses to Gen. 22.2. The messianic catch is not subject to condemnation.

[10] Expiation of the effects of sin is strongly suggested by the organic idiom and dynamic analogy of Isa. 25.8 recapitulated in 1 Cor 15.54: that God “swallows up” (piel of בָּלַע ) sin and death.

[It] is etymologically certain that the original meaning of blʿ בָּלַע was “to gulp down” or “to swallow,” lit. “to snatch with the mouth and to gulp down through the esophagus”… The basic root means …to swallow food rapidly in connection with certain miraculous events: seven thin ears swallow seven fat ones (Gen. 41:7, 24), Aaron’s rod swallows the rods of the Egyptian magicians (Ex. 7:12), Yahweh’s right hand swallows the earth (Ex. 15:12), a fish swallows the prophet Jonah (Jonah 2:1[1:17])… The company with Korah is swallowed up by the ground (Nu. 16:30, 32, 34; 26:10; Dt. 11:6; Ps. 106:17), Israel is swallowed up by her enemies (Hos. 8:8; Ps. 124:3), the inhabitants of Jerusalem are swallowed up by Nebuchadnezzar (Jer. 51:34), and the godly are swallowed up (alive) by sinners (Prov. 1:12).--Schüpphaus, J. (1977). בָּלַע. In Botterweck & Ringgren (TDOT Vol. 2, pp. 137–138, emph. added).

The fulfillment of God’s promise in Isa. 25 and Psalm 20 is fulfilled by Christus Victor on the Cross as an atoning miracle of taking on and metaphorically digesting—as a blood process--the sin that deals death. This organic idiom is more properly understood as exemplifying “expiation” of the causes and effects of death rather than enduring a “propitiating” atonement of penal substitution.

[11] Jesus gives us the Eucharist in part to express that religion is initiated in God’s gracious giving and not in human petitions or gifts accompanying temple sacrifices.

[12] Announced by Jesus during his ministry in Matt. 7.1. Cf. Rom. 2.1.

[13] Contrary to Lambert’s (2016; 2021) theory of atonement that magnifies (in a negative sense) Anselm’s, God’s righteousness is not manifest in his punishments. Rom. 1.17, which Lambert (2021) cites as revealing the righteousness of God in assessing “penalty”—and an “infinite penalty for sin” at that--rather links God’s “revealed righteousness that is out of faith unto faith,” with faith equivalent to trusting allegiance. According to Paul (and Ps. 116.5-6) and contrary to Lambert, God’s righteousness is his grace and mercy that flow from protective faithfulness to his creation and which proceed to imbue in us our faithfulness and allegiance to him (cf. Ps. 143.11b). Lambert’s is an inverted reading. He attributes to God a putative righteousness that reveals punitive “penalty” rather than to processing and allegiant grace in Paul. Moreover, Lambert (2021) repeatedly refers to Christ’s “payment” of satisfaction for sin, which appears a questionable rendering of the redemption and ransom Greek cognates of “lutron.” In contrast, the early Church understood that this ransom by Christ was rendered NOT to God but rather to the demonic powers over sin which held humans in bondage. In this latter case, like that of Rom. 1.17, punitive satisfaction of a sin debt as “propitiation” is NOT a feature of God’s righteousness but is occasioned by demonic agents and associated psychological fixations of guilt-ridden human consciences. “Payment of penalty” mistakes the primary cause of God’s grace by confusing it with a secondary causation of human psychology infantilely fixed on “infinite punishment.”

    Eisegeting “penalty” into texts that do not refer to such inverts the message of God’s righteousness revealed in grace and faithfulness to creation rather than in Anselmic conceptions of retributive satisfaction. Rom. 1.17 is a text of revealed righteousness’s circulating grace which sustains and manifests God’s allegiance to his creation (cf. Ps. 89: 8, 14).

[14] “The idea [Anselm’s theory of atonement] that God cannot show mercy without the satisfaction of his [punitive] justice, and that he views yet an additional crime as constituting such satisfaction, casts a most dubious picture of God.” — Robert Jenson.

[15] The faultiness of a “we” finding or considering a punitive penalty applied to the infirmity bearer in this verse is indicated by the Hebrew lexicography and sentence structure. As Goldingay notes, “(ʾākēn) with which the line begins advertises that vv. 4–6 testify to a new understanding …which the speakers have now come to.” (Goldingay and Payne 2006, Vol. 2, 304).

Thus, the bicola structure of Isa. 53.4 is set up by this initial word as a contrast--to contrast the new understanding with an old understanding of suffering, pain, and infirmity. The mid-sentence conjunction “vav” is accordingly almost certainly contrastive, so that “yet” is the warranted translation that opposes what was introduced as the “sureness” of one coming to bear our infirmities. This determination of contrastive ‘vav’ is supported by the semantic sense in the following verb חָשַׁב‎ ḥāšaḇ;, “the negative connotation [of which] can also be seen in expressions of purpose” like that denoted in this verse.--Seybold, K. חָשַׁב. (In Botterweck & Ringgren 1986, TDOT Vol. 5, 234 emph. added).

My exegesis of Isa. 53.4ff suggests that linking the bearer of infirmities to divinely-purposed penalty is not the view of the prophet, or at a minimum subject to a new or reformed understanding of the purpose and function of the one who bears infirmities, and thus of infirmities themselves. In vv. 10 and 12, crushing pain accompanies the Servant’s bearing of sin—as one would expect a holy God to experience of amassed sin--but the chapter has this bearing of infirmities imaged apotropaically rather than satisfying retributive justice. Neither of the verbs translated as “bear” in vv. 10 and 12 connote the satisfaction of a penalty. Their sense in each case is that of carrying a burden. The prophet, if he had intended to point to the satisfaction of a penalty for sin, had two opportunities to make a verbal choice to that end. Instead, he repeated the verbal sense noted, highly marking it for his hearers’ (and our) instruction.

Correspondingly, Psalm 22, with its references to the Crucifixion, notes that the infliction of suffering is delivered by human enemies characterized metaphorically as wild and powerful animals. In this profound picture of affliction, God is nowhere attributed its agent—as to fulfill a plan(ned penalty). Likewise, John 19.37 quoting Zec. 12.10 attributes common cause of those who looked on with those who “pierced” God’s servant. The agency of piercing is explicitly attributed to humans, not with God. By implication of this silence regarding divine participation, we may conclude that the responsible agents of the Servant’s piercing are humans.

[16] Branson, R. D., & Botterweck, G. J. יָסַר. (In Botterweck and Ringgren 1990, TDOT Vol. 6, p. 130).

[17] This psychology marks and underlies Jephthah’s sacrificial vow in Judg. 11.30ff. Jephthah links deliverance with nepocidal sacrifice. This tragic agent was ignorant of his father and the responsibility of fatherhood—elemental features of theology and shalom. His psychological dysfunction and theological ignorance bring forth the death of his child. Jephthah’s ultimate tragic flaw is to commend and follow through with human sacrifice for the maintenance of his well-being. Is such a tragic, willful psychology and piety behind human need to see Jesus’ sacrifice as an offering to God that satisfies and delivers from punitive wrath? Debased sacrificial psychology is a problem laid onto the flawed and unbelieving figure of Jephthah whose actions figure as the reverse of the Passover (Bejon 2021: https://jamesbejon.substack.com/p/the-book-of-judges-and-its-anti-feasts). Anti-type parallels with the death of Jesus include the unnamed daughter’s virginity (her lack of progeny) and her weeping request for concessions (prefiguring Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane). And yet, Jephthah tragically recapitulates the agonistic ultimacy of pagan piety in Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia to appease Artemis. His appeasement is pagan sacrificial atonement that deals death, in contrast with Jesus’ triumphant, atoning expiatory sacrifice that gives life in and through his blood.

The shocking story of Jephthah reveals what happens when a man of ambition and eloquence operates inside of God’s real and canonical silence. Such a man creates an idol of his own solipsistic and violent persona which he deems to demand appeasement. Jephthah encapsulates Israelite agonism: he is a brutalizer of his jealous and haughty countrymen, a bargainer with his idea of god, a manipulator and victimizer. The result is his offering his daughter to gain glory, goals, and graces. Yet: Atonement is not appeasement. Sacrificing for the appeasement of a silent god reveals the self-projecting echo chambers of agonistic (not: agnostic) mind and unwise piety.

[18] Cf. the picture of the people’s dispersion in Ezek. 22.13-17. Their blood-guilt is purged by the divine sanction of their exile from the land, not by the infliction of violent wrath upon their persons. Such violence as they may be subject is of a secondary cause.

                A substitutionary punitive atonement obscures the transmission of primary cause becoming secondary causation by our participation in Christ indicated in 2 Cor. 5.20-21 and emphatically contextualized by v. 6.1. More work needs to be done on the processive (“becoming”) nature of righteous causations in those verses without reverting to a simplistic, miraculous emergence (instantaneous status) denoted by the claim of “imputation.” Cf. http://www.jesuspeoples.org/uploads/2/5/9/5/25952673/wright_becoming_righteousness.pdf

[19]

Anselm. Therefore to sin is nothing else than not to render to God his due.

Boso. What is the debt which we owe to God?

Anselm. Every wish of a rational creature should be subject to the will of God.

Boso. Nothing is more true.

Anselm. This is the debt which man and angel owe to God, and no one who pays this debt commits sin; but every one who does not pay it sins. This is justice, or uprightness of will, which makes a being just or upright in heart, that is, in will; and this is the sole and complete debt of honor which we owe to God, and which God requires of us. For it is such a will only, when it can be exercised, that does works pleasing to God; and when this will cannot be exercised, it is pleasing of itself alone, since without it no work is acceptable. He who does not render this honor which is due to God, robs God of his own and dishonors him; and this is sin. Moreover, so long as he does not restore what he has taken away, he remains in fault; and it will not suffice merely to restore what has been taken away, but, considering the contempt offered, he ought to restore more than he took away. For as one who imperils another’s safety does not enough by merely restoring his safety, without making some compensation for the anguish incurred; so he who violates another’s honor does not enough by merely rendering honor again, but must, according to the extent of the injury done, make restoration in some way satisfactory to the person whom he has dishonored. We must also observe that when any one pays what he has unjustly taken away, he ought to give something which could not have been p. 200 demanded of him, had he not stolen what belonged to another. So then, every one who sins ought to pay back the honor of which he has robbed God; and this is the satisfaction which every sinner owes to God.

 Works of St. Anselm, tr. by Sidney Norton Deane, [1903, XI, 199], at sacred-texts.com

Citations:

    

AulénGustaf, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main

 Types of the Idea of Atonement (1930).


Botterweck, G. J. & H. Ringgren (Eds.), D. E. Green (Trans.). Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: Eerdmans, 1977, 1986, 1990.

Goldingay, J., & Payne, D. (2006). A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Isaiah 40–55. (G. I. Davies & G. N. Stanton, Eds.). London; New York: T&T Clark.

Lambert, Heath. A Theology of Biblical Counseling: The Doctrinal Foundations of Counseling Ministry. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2016.

n.b.: The cited page numbers from this source were derived from an electronic pdf and may vary from the published book by a 1-2 pages.

___“Guilt and Repentance.” Presented at the Northcreek Counseling Training Conference, Walnut Creek, CA, September 18, 2021.

Schnittjer, Gary E. The Torah Story Video Lectures: An Apprenticeship on the Pentateuch. MasterLectures. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017.