Yes, I got one.
I could argue the mitigating circumstances - that the gap I went for closed up on me and I had to take evasive action or get smashed (which is why the police saw me shoot between the cars) and that was why I was still going to fast when we got to the roadworks. However, I have had it coming for a long time, and even if it was a bit unfair today, i accept it for all the times I have deserved it and got away with it.
But in the light of current discusion as to the nature of Christ's atonement, and whether the penalty he paid was a simple consequence of our sins or a judicial punishement for our breaches of God's law, perhaps I should have asked the policemen whether the my fixed penalty notice was a judicial punishment for breaking the speed limit or whether it was just nature taking its course.
(I suspect the natural consequences of speeding would be a traffic accident, whereas a fine seems strongly judicial).
Put simply - in common language and in theology a 'penalty' is a punishment for breaking the law.
Showing posts with label Girard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Girard. Show all posts
Friday, June 8
Tuesday, June 5
Substitution
Imagine the scene.
Following several high-profile cases of child abduction, rape and murder in the UK a few years ago, there was a media campaign to name known peadophiles. Vigilante mobs of outraged parents scoured the streets looking for them. A lady doctor, advertising as a paediatrician, had bricks thrown through her windows becasue the mob confused peadiatrician and peadophile.
Now, strange as this request may be, place yourslef in the mind of the paedophile. He cowers in his home, hearing the angry mob outside and seeing bricks come crashing in. and understand that this man - foul though he is - represents you. Yes his sins are more identifiable than yours, but sin is sin. And the mob outside is an embodyment of God's own outrage at the sins of the paedophile. (Not that God is a vigilante - he acts within the law - it's just the sense of justified outrage that I'm trying to picture)
So there we have it - the sinner confronted with the anger his sin has caused.
At this moment, in my picture, Christ appears in the house. he takes on the appearence of the peadophile, opens the door, and walks out. The shrill roar of the crowd reaches a crescendo, and christ is enveloped in a flurry of beating hands, kicking feet, spit, sticks, bricks - until his lifeless body is dragged away.
This illustration has many serious theological flaws eg having a wild mob to represent God's wrath, and it plays to the Girardian atonement concept that I have criticised before, and doesn't mention resurrection - but the picture of Christ taking my deserved punishment has been powerful for me these last few days.
Following several high-profile cases of child abduction, rape and murder in the UK a few years ago, there was a media campaign to name known peadophiles. Vigilante mobs of outraged parents scoured the streets looking for them. A lady doctor, advertising as a paediatrician, had bricks thrown through her windows becasue the mob confused peadiatrician and peadophile.
Now, strange as this request may be, place yourslef in the mind of the paedophile. He cowers in his home, hearing the angry mob outside and seeing bricks come crashing in. and understand that this man - foul though he is - represents you. Yes his sins are more identifiable than yours, but sin is sin. And the mob outside is an embodyment of God's own outrage at the sins of the paedophile. (Not that God is a vigilante - he acts within the law - it's just the sense of justified outrage that I'm trying to picture)
So there we have it - the sinner confronted with the anger his sin has caused.
At this moment, in my picture, Christ appears in the house. he takes on the appearence of the peadophile, opens the door, and walks out. The shrill roar of the crowd reaches a crescendo, and christ is enveloped in a flurry of beating hands, kicking feet, spit, sticks, bricks - until his lifeless body is dragged away.
This illustration has many serious theological flaws eg having a wild mob to represent God's wrath, and it plays to the Girardian atonement concept that I have criticised before, and doesn't mention resurrection - but the picture of Christ taking my deserved punishment has been powerful for me these last few days.
Thank you, Lord Jesus!
Wednesday, May 30
Hot Springs to Heresy
As I child I went to Rotorua in New Zealand. This is an area of geysers, hot springs, and boiling mud. The mud made an impression on me because you could see where a bubble was about to appear – the surface would slowly heave up, then it would seem to stretch and get thinner before finally the bubble would burst, splattering hot mud randomly in all directions.
The is how this post is coming – it has been brooding for some time, and now POP..here it is, sending stuff randomly all around.
Some bloke wrote a letter to the Church of England Newspaper, saying that in ‘Penal substitution’ the word penal doesn’t come in the legal sense but in terms of the penalty, ie consequences, of our actions. He argued that Jesus does not take our punishment, just the fallout from our deeds.
This is in line with a lot of other stuff I have read recently, all with his same theme that God is such a loving God that he couldn’t possibly dream of punishing us for our sins, and that God has not written any laws for us to break and so there is no need for punishment: its just a matter of trying to live without hurting anyone and facing natural cause-and-effect consequences of our mistakes. There is a suggestion that God himself is not wronged by our sins, its just our fellow man.
So why do we always repeat in the Lord’s prayer “Forgive us our trespasses…”?
If there is no law, there is no need for forgiveness.
If there is no punishment, there is not need for forgiveness.
If we have not wronged God, he does not need to forgive us.
Therefore, since we regularly beg for forgiveness as Christ taught us, there must be something to be forgiven for.
If there is no law, there is no trespass.
If there is no trespass, there is no need for forgiveness.
So what I am saying is that the Lords Prayer, recognised by every Christian in the world, embodies the concept of breaking God’s law and needing to be forgiven by him for it.
The Penalty is not just a natural consequence, it is punishment according to God’s law. (PS, to say Penalty just means consequences doesn’t make sense, either from the etymology of the word or from its use in common language. If the Police give me a fixed penalty notice for illegal parking, it is a punishment for breaking the law, not just a natural consequence of my action)
Now, without going into a whole "quote scripture" section which would take all day, the punishment for trespassing God’s law is death.
[NB I am not referring particularly to the OT ‘law’, more to God’s instructions and commands generally]
This takes us on to that verse in Hebrews – “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins”.
The punishment for sin is death. That is an absolute eternal principle that even God will not break. Every sin requires a death. Forgiveness is not a casual “oh well, never mind, don’t do it again’. Sin can’t be forgiven without death. If you think about it this makes sense – if I sin against God by injuring my brother, and God were to just dismiss it, my brother would say “Hey, what about me? Where’s my justice?” So my sin against my brother requires justice – it requires a death under the terms of God’s law.
So the only way that we can be forgiven, is for that punishment to be implemented, but not in a way that we feel.
And so, Jesus bore my sins in his body on the cross. In a sense I was in him, crucified with him, but he was the one that felt the pain.
When my victims turn to God and demand their justice, he replies “Yes, those sins have been punished, Simon died in Jesus”.
Yet when I present myself to God, he says, “Yes, you have lived a perfect life in Jesus”
This is the love of God. Not that he ignores sins, but that he deals with them properly in a way that ensures justice for the victim and freedom and forgiveness for me.
And it is only by taking that punishment onto his eternal self that he could bring these opposites together.
And so, I believe in Penal Substitution. I believe that I deserved to be punished because I have broken God’s commands. But I believe that I have been crucified with Christ, and that I live with Christ.
He has substituted himself for me and taken my Penalty.
And I can only say Hallelujah, and worship him with thanksgiving.
But the reason I say all this is that I am really worried that there is a deep, truly sinister heresy growing in the church.
If we deny that God makes laws, and if we deny that he will punish us for breaking them, then we are saying exactly the same as the serpent in the Garden of Eden. And that is Very Dangerous!
And that is why I speak out for the true message of the cross.
The is how this post is coming – it has been brooding for some time, and now POP..here it is, sending stuff randomly all around.
Some bloke wrote a letter to the Church of England Newspaper, saying that in ‘Penal substitution’ the word penal doesn’t come in the legal sense but in terms of the penalty, ie consequences, of our actions. He argued that Jesus does not take our punishment, just the fallout from our deeds.
This is in line with a lot of other stuff I have read recently, all with his same theme that God is such a loving God that he couldn’t possibly dream of punishing us for our sins, and that God has not written any laws for us to break and so there is no need for punishment: its just a matter of trying to live without hurting anyone and facing natural cause-and-effect consequences of our mistakes. There is a suggestion that God himself is not wronged by our sins, its just our fellow man.
So why do we always repeat in the Lord’s prayer “Forgive us our trespasses…”?
If there is no law, there is no need for forgiveness.
If there is no punishment, there is not need for forgiveness.
If we have not wronged God, he does not need to forgive us.
Therefore, since we regularly beg for forgiveness as Christ taught us, there must be something to be forgiven for.
If there is no law, there is no trespass.
If there is no trespass, there is no need for forgiveness.
So what I am saying is that the Lords Prayer, recognised by every Christian in the world, embodies the concept of breaking God’s law and needing to be forgiven by him for it.
The Penalty is not just a natural consequence, it is punishment according to God’s law. (PS, to say Penalty just means consequences doesn’t make sense, either from the etymology of the word or from its use in common language. If the Police give me a fixed penalty notice for illegal parking, it is a punishment for breaking the law, not just a natural consequence of my action)
Now, without going into a whole "quote scripture" section which would take all day, the punishment for trespassing God’s law is death.
[NB I am not referring particularly to the OT ‘law’, more to God’s instructions and commands generally]
This takes us on to that verse in Hebrews – “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins”.
The punishment for sin is death. That is an absolute eternal principle that even God will not break. Every sin requires a death. Forgiveness is not a casual “oh well, never mind, don’t do it again’. Sin can’t be forgiven without death. If you think about it this makes sense – if I sin against God by injuring my brother, and God were to just dismiss it, my brother would say “Hey, what about me? Where’s my justice?” So my sin against my brother requires justice – it requires a death under the terms of God’s law.
So the only way that we can be forgiven, is for that punishment to be implemented, but not in a way that we feel.
And so, Jesus bore my sins in his body on the cross. In a sense I was in him, crucified with him, but he was the one that felt the pain.
When my victims turn to God and demand their justice, he replies “Yes, those sins have been punished, Simon died in Jesus”.
Yet when I present myself to God, he says, “Yes, you have lived a perfect life in Jesus”
This is the love of God. Not that he ignores sins, but that he deals with them properly in a way that ensures justice for the victim and freedom and forgiveness for me.
And it is only by taking that punishment onto his eternal self that he could bring these opposites together.
And so, I believe in Penal Substitution. I believe that I deserved to be punished because I have broken God’s commands. But I believe that I have been crucified with Christ, and that I live with Christ.
He has substituted himself for me and taken my Penalty.
And I can only say Hallelujah, and worship him with thanksgiving.
But the reason I say all this is that I am really worried that there is a deep, truly sinister heresy growing in the church.
If we deny that God makes laws, and if we deny that he will punish us for breaking them, then we are saying exactly the same as the serpent in the Garden of Eden. And that is Very Dangerous!
And that is why I speak out for the true message of the cross.
Thursday, May 10
Girardian Scapegoatism
Buck Eschaton has introduced me to the Girardian concept of atonement and scapegoatism.
While it raises some valid points, and rightly denounces any form of mob lynching, it requires you to suspend a consistent interpretation of scripture, zooming in on the bits that support the theory but disregarding those that don’t.
This idea reduces the death of Christ to a mere mob lynching (it was a lynching but that is only one aspect of it).
It denies that God is angry at sin. (He’s not much of a God if he will watch Hitler and Pol Pot without getting a little hot under the collar…)
It denies justice for the victims of sin. Unqualified forgiveness is an insult to the victims. (See recent press reports of English Vicars who sexually abused choir boys and the church forgave without taking disciplinary action. These cases have now blown up 20 years later.) In true Christian Atonement, the perpetrator is punished by God in Christ, and so from the victim’s perspective, bearing in mind that He forbids us from taking revenge but says "Vengance is mine, I will repay", justice is received from God.
It denies the divine origin of the Old Testament sacrificial system, in particular the scapegoat ritual. (It makes this section of the OT to be a product of Josiah’s reforms.)
It introduces a non-biblical “Oh, well, never mind, forget it” concept of forgiveness which has more in common with Islam than Christianity. (as above)
It insults the heroes of our faith, and makes Joshua to be guilty of lynching Achan, when he was following God’s orders in a state execution.
The whole idea is a classic case of theological invention, and a poor one at that, which would be laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous. In fact, blasphemous. It interprets the work of God as human sin.
Some of you will no doubt follow my links, read it and be taken in. I urge you see instead the gaping flaws in the logic.
For example – in one of Buck’s posts he denounced Joshua for sentencing Achan without the evidence of two or more witnesses. Well, he confessed, and when a group of men went to his tent they found it was true, ie there were more than two witnesses, and the legal requirement was fulfilled. If this is the quality of the Girardian case, it is clearly weak.
The strength of this rant gives it more credit than it is due.
While it raises some valid points, and rightly denounces any form of mob lynching, it requires you to suspend a consistent interpretation of scripture, zooming in on the bits that support the theory but disregarding those that don’t.
This idea reduces the death of Christ to a mere mob lynching (it was a lynching but that is only one aspect of it).
It denies that God is angry at sin. (He’s not much of a God if he will watch Hitler and Pol Pot without getting a little hot under the collar…)
It denies justice for the victims of sin. Unqualified forgiveness is an insult to the victims. (See recent press reports of English Vicars who sexually abused choir boys and the church forgave without taking disciplinary action. These cases have now blown up 20 years later.) In true Christian Atonement, the perpetrator is punished by God in Christ, and so from the victim’s perspective, bearing in mind that He forbids us from taking revenge but says "Vengance is mine, I will repay", justice is received from God.
It denies the divine origin of the Old Testament sacrificial system, in particular the scapegoat ritual. (It makes this section of the OT to be a product of Josiah’s reforms.)
It introduces a non-biblical “Oh, well, never mind, forget it” concept of forgiveness which has more in common with Islam than Christianity. (as above)
It insults the heroes of our faith, and makes Joshua to be guilty of lynching Achan, when he was following God’s orders in a state execution.
The whole idea is a classic case of theological invention, and a poor one at that, which would be laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous. In fact, blasphemous. It interprets the work of God as human sin.
Some of you will no doubt follow my links, read it and be taken in. I urge you see instead the gaping flaws in the logic.
For example – in one of Buck’s posts he denounced Joshua for sentencing Achan without the evidence of two or more witnesses. Well, he confessed, and when a group of men went to his tent they found it was true, ie there were more than two witnesses, and the legal requirement was fulfilled. If this is the quality of the Girardian case, it is clearly weak.
The strength of this rant gives it more credit than it is due.
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