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[Regnus Numis]

How could a physical death be enough to ensure our salvation if the wages of sin is spiritual death? How could a finite punishment on the cross liberate sinners who supposedly deserve infinite punishment in Hell? Also, if God and Jesus are the same being, does that mean God sacrificed himself to himself to appease himself? Or even if they were separate beings, isn't it redundant for God to go out of His way and arrange His son to be sacrificed in order to appease Himself so that He may spare us from His own wrath? Why not simply forgive mankind instead of executing such a convoluted plan to "save" us from Himself?

[jimwalton]

> How could a physical death be enough to ensure our salvation if the wages of sin is spiritual death?

It's a matter of the legal requirements. For instance, if I owed you $1000 dollars, and someone else offered to pay it for me, the debt would be paid and we could both walk away.

According to the Bible, Jesus' death was more like that than, say, going to prison in someone's place. Let's just suppose, for the sake of analogy (though all analogies fall short if pressed too hard), that all humans owed God a hundred billion dollars. Each. It does no good for me to offer to cover your debt, because I don't even have the hundred billion for me let alone for you. Nobody has it. But now somebody shows up on the scene who doesn't already owe God anything, and he just happens to have 100 trillion in his account (I didn't do the math; you get the analogy), enough to cover all of us. Now THAT guy can pay the debt and satisfy the legalities of the ledger.

So, Romans 6.23 tells us that when we separated from God (who is Life) because of our sin, death was the only and expected consequence (separation from life). Death was the wages, so to speak, for our "work". So we're all separated from God (life), and "dead" in our sins. It does no good for me to say, "Hey, I'll die instead of you," because I'm already sentenced to death. It's as if 2 guys are standing at the gallows with nooses around their necks, and one says to the other, "You're free to go. I'll take this one in your place." Like that does any good.

But Jesus shows up on the scene with no sin in him, so he had never separated from Life, and never deserved to die. When he says, "You're free to go. I'll take this one in your place," now that means something.

But maybe you're thinking, "Well, maybe he could do that for one person, but not for all of us." Now we have to go back to the money analogy. Legally speaking, his death was so unwarranted because he was sinless AND he was God in the flesh that his death could cover all of humanity, and liberate sinners who supposedly deserve punishment in hell (with "infinite" part is debatable, and for another discussion). It's what the book of Hebrews is about, as well as Isaiah 53.

Maybe this analogy will help (as far as it goes): Sometimes in ancient battles, instead of the whole army going at it all day, each army would send out a champion, winner take all. We even do this in some of our games today: winner take all. Think of it like that. One life substitutes for all.

The ancients were well acquainted with the idea of substitution like that. Kill a lamb as a sacrifice for the nation. Some kings even sacrificed their first born son (detestable) to appease the deity for their whole country (or city or whatever). With Jesus it is the same idea of substitution: one can count for all.

His physical death could ensure salvation in a spiritual world because his physical death was also a spiritual death: separated from God, bearing the sins of the world in his flesh, a substitution for us. Again, it's a legal and theological matter more than trying to make a direct connection between flesh and blood—soul and spirit.

> if God and Jesus are the same being, does that mean God sacrificed himself to himself to appease himself?

Not really. In the Bible, the Trinity distinguishes between the *principle* of divine action and the *subject* of divine action. The principle of all divine action is the one undivided divine essence, but the subject of divine action is either Father, Son, or Holy Spirit. The Father can send the Son according to his power, and the Son can be incarnated according to his nature without dividing the divine essence. In other words, God didn't sacrifice himself to appease himself. The Son sacrificed Himself, at the will of the Father, to appease the legal demands of sin on humanity.

> Or even if they were separate beings, isn't it redundant for God to go out of His way and arrange His son to be sacrificed in order to appease Himself so that He may spare us from His own wrath?

Not really. It's a matter of consequences, not of choice. If you separate yourself from life (as humans made a willful choice to do), then death is the necessary and inevitable consequence. It's not that God rains down wrath upon you because he's just that kind of guy, but because in separating yourself from love, grace, mercy, life, and holiness, the necessary and inevitable consequences is absence of love, lack of grace and mercy, death, and corruption. Jesus' sacrifice was an act of love to reverse the inevitable, giving you a free shot at love, grace, mercy, life, and holiness. Please take advantage of that opportunity and turn to Him in response to his offer.

> Why not simply forgive mankind instead of executing such a convoluted plan to "save" us from Himself?

Because choices have consequences, structures have stipulations, and actions require reactions. A breach (sin) has happened in the universe bringing about an imbalance that has to be righted. But it can't be righted in any way just willy-nilly, but in a way that restores balance according the nature of the universe. A legal infraction has happened for which there are consequences, and for justice to truly be justice, such infractions can't be brushed off as inconsequential. Our actions (in Adam and Eve as representatives of the human race) have caused the universe to fall, and that must be undone by a rising (a resurrection). Your question implies that you think debt should be able to be paid by something unrelated, like, say, playing a song on the piano. No, that has nothing to do with anything. Debt must be righted by payment, sin must be paid by death, imbalance must be restored by proper measures.

[A Capella]

Pardon my jumping-in, but...

>A legal infraction has happened for which there are consequences, and for justice to truly be justice, such infractions can't be brushed off as inconsequential.

For justice to truly be justice, wouldn't it make sense for the people who committed the crime to pay for the crimes they committed?
In other words, under Christian teaching, not only are we expected to pay for our own sins, but also for those of Adam and Eve (for no apparent good reason). Not only that, but we're expected to let Jesus pay "for" us -- which I suppose is well and good for the ancestral crimes we haven't committed, but it seems like a shirking of justice for the ones that we did.

To make matters worse, the punishment for the crimes we've committed is, it would seem, uniform and disproportionate. An otherwise saintly person who may have told a few white lies during their lifetime, or maybe got fresh with their parents as a teenager, faces the same eternal damnation as a life-long serial rapist.

In a just system, we would simply pay for our own sins, according to their severity. But the Christian system seems unconcerned with justice, and much closer to a kind of moral racketeering scheme.

> Your question implies that you think debt should be able to be paid by something unrelated, like, say, playing a song on the piano.

How is Jesus' death any more closely related to our sins than that?

[jimwalton]

> For justice to truly be justice, wouldn't it make sense for the people who committed the crime to pay for the crimes they committed?

There are different ways of looking at the substitution concept. On the one hand, if someone wants to pay a monetary debt in our place, we're grateful. On another hand, if someone innocent wants to serve a jail sentence for a convicted criminal, we think that's not fair, and rightly so. Jesus' sufferings for us are more like the first rather than the second, according to the Bible.

If you have a debt of, say, $50,000, and a friend of yours steps up and offers to pay it for you, just because he's your friend, you would (I bet) gladly accept. It's the same thing here. Each of us has a debt, a debt of sin and the payment is death (Rom. 6.23). So instead of money, the debt is life. Jesus stepped up and offered to pay it for you, just because he loves you. He has a right to be generous with you if he chooses. You may logically object, "Life is different from money." Not as far as the definition of debt is concerned. You may object that money debt is different from punishment debt. Let's look at the technicalities of the law. Supposing a slave back in colonial America was due to receive 40 lashes, and another man stepped up and offered to take the 40 lashes in his place. Technically as to the law, as long as the 40 lashes got delivered to a back, the law was served. That's the point here. Technically, as long as the punishment is paid, justice is served. But is it fair?

It's fair on two points: The first is that Jesus volunteered to be the substitute. He had every right to make the decision, and he chose to take the punishment for you (Jn. 10.17-18). Doesn't he have a right to be generous towards you? The second point would be that Christian Trinitarian theology says that the Son and the Father are one, and so whatever the son does, the father also does. Thus, the father didn't place the punishment on anyone other than himself, so you can't fault him for cruelty. In a courtroom analogy, the judge doesn't throw the punishment on some innocent, objecting bystander, but takes it upon himself. Doesn't he have a right to be generous towards you?

> To make matters worse, the punishment for the crimes we've committed is, it would seem, uniform and disproportionate. An otherwise saintly person who may have told a few white lies during their lifetime, or maybe got fresh with their parents as a teenager, faces the same eternal damnation as a life-long serial rapist.

This is incorrect. There are also degrees of punishment in hell; it's not "One Fire Fits All." So also there are degrees of reward in heaven. Not everything gets the same thing. the Bible is very clear that we will be rewarded or punished according to what we have actually done. People can be punished worse or less based on their lives and what they deserve.

I happen to be convinced hell is not literally fire, but the agony of true separation from God. I say that because fire doesn't have degrees of punishment, but hell does. Degrees of separation makes more sense to me than degrees of being burned. I believe hell is degrees of punishment, based on the sin (though not levels of hell, as in Dante. Ironically, though, even Dante said hell is an endless, hopeless conversation with oneself). Here's my proof:

- Mt. 11.22-24 – "more tolerable"
- Mt. 23.14 – "greater condemnation"
- Rev. 20.13 – "each in proportion to his works"
- Lk. 10.12 – "it will be more bearable for Sodom than for that town"
- Lk. 12.47-48 – beaten with few blows or more blows

So there will be true justice, and it will be proportionate to the good or bad done.

> How is Jesus' death any more closely related to our sins than that?

Because the wages of sin is death, therefore Jesus' death is exactly related to the crime and the punishment. It's a direct correlation.

[Conundrum]

This isn't a friend stepping up to pay, it's the guy you owe money too, taking money out of one pocket and making a show of putting it in the other pocket instead of just saying forget about it. That still makes no sense.

Whipping boys and scapegoats are not justice. Justice was never served by allowing an innocent person to suffer instead of the guilty. A slave master may have done that, but that doesn't make it justice. Laws aren't even always just. As for fairness and being generous, laws don't even allow all debts, rights, or assets to be transferable, never-mind criminal punishments.

If punishment is just temporary physical death, then everyone revived from drowning can go to heaven. If punishment was separation from the divine, Jesus can't be both separated and still divine.

Arguably, if someone creates something they know will malfunction and cause harm, there should be culpability there already, and then it's not a matter of being generous at all.

[jimwalton]

Then you still don't understand. You seem to have some mental blocks to the truth of what atonement is.

> This isn't a friend stepping up to pay, it's the guy you owe money too, taking money out of one pocket and making a show of putting it in the other pocket instead of just saying forget about it.

This is not what it is. We incur a literal moral and spiritual debt. It's not just God playing a game with cups, and good luck guessing which one the ball is under—Oh, you lose, sorry, play again. God has not just arbitrarily created a situation of owing Him something and then not giving you a way to pay it. Justice is part of the make-up of existence, and when we sinned we created a veritable imbalance.

> Whipping boys and scapegoats are not justice. Justice was never served by allowing an innocent person to suffer instead of the guilty.

You're right, but you're also wrong. Scapegoats were temporary measures to alleviate a problem until the real solution could be brought to bear on the real problem. It's not that justice was served by allowing an innocent person to suffer instead of the guilty, it's that the imbalance could only be rectified by someone not already under condemnation.

> If punishment is just temporary physical death, then everyone revived from drowning can go to heaven.

This is a separate conversation from the one we're having, so it must be a grating point for you that you brought it up. The effective factor is not reduced by the temporariness of the physical death. What makes the sacrifice effective is that Jesus truly bore the sins of the world. That's all that needed to happen: one who was not already under condemnation bore the condemnation.

> If punishment was separation from the divine, Jesus can't be both separated and still divine.

Not sure what you mean by this, but it sounds off the side of the conversation also—another pet peeve I presume. It sounds like a question about the trinity. As I said in a previous post, the Trinity distinguishes between the *principle* of divine action and the *subject* of divine action. The principle of all divine action is the one undivided divine essence, but the subject of divine action is either Father, Son, or Holy Spirit. The Father can send the Son according to his power, and the Son can be incarnated according to his nature without dividing the divine essence. In other words, God didn't sacrifice himself to appease himself. The Son sacrificed Himself, at the will of the Father, to appease the legal demands of sin on humanity.

> if someone creates something they know will malfunction and cause harm, there should be culpability there already, and then it's not a matter of being generous at all.

Again you misunderstand. If the only perfect being is that which is uncreated (viz., God), then any created being is ipso facto less than perfect, and there is no possibility of any other reality. God knew that what He was creating was not God, and therefore the way from made from the very beginning for God Himself to make up the difference so that humans could have life and wisdom. That doesn't make God guilty, it makes him loving, just, merciful, and full of grace.

[A capella]

> There are different ways of looking at the substitution concept. On the one hand, if someone wants to pay a monetary debt in our place, we're grateful. On another hand, if someone innocent wants to serve a jail sentence for a convicted criminal, we think that's not fair, and rightly so. Jesus' sufferings for us are more like the first rather than the second, according to the Bible.

I disagree. Let's imagine a third and more accurate case: someone claims that we have a debt of $1,000,000, passed on to us by an anonymous and wicked ancestor, which they agree to pay for us, on the condition that we worship them and are obedient them for the rest of our lives -- and on the stipulation that if we don't pay, we'll be tortured for eternity by our generous benefactor's father. But for the moment, let's ignore the fact that this transaction is already sullied by coercion. This might seem like a reasonable transaction if we actually agree that we owe $1,000,000. Almost everyone today would balk at the idea of owing vast sums of money incurred by the actions of unnamed ancestors with whom we have no legal agreements, though. We even laugh at the idea of slave reparations, and some of those debts are well-documented.
If we deny the $1,000,000 as fraudulent, and admit to having only $50 of debt which we actually incurred ourselves, then we would hardly call this a generous offer. We'd call it racket.

> It's fair on two points: The first is that Jesus volunteered to be the substitute. He had every right to make the decision, and he chose to take the punishment for you (Jn. 10.17-18). Doesn't he have a right to be generous towards you?

Not necessarily. I'd consider it a violation of both privacy and freedom.

> The second point would be that Christian Trinitarian theology says that the Son and the Father are one, and so whatever the son does, the father also does. Thus, the father didn't place the punishment on anyone other than himself, so you can't fault him for cruelty. In a courtroom analogy, the judge doesn't throw the punishment on some innocent, objecting bystander, but takes it upon himself. Doesn't he have a right to be generous towards you?

Even if this were true, the "generosity" of the offer doesn't come without strings, nor is it really "free", since you'll be brutally punished for not making it.

> This is incorrect. There are also degrees of punishment in hell; it's not "One Fire Fits All." So also there are degrees of reward in heaven. Not everything gets the same thing. the Bible is very clear that we will be rewarded or punished according to what we have actually done. People can be punished worse or less based on their lives and what they deserve.

That's interesting, but isn't the punishment still for eternity? There is no real difference between a "few" blows or "more" blows if the punishment lasts forever.

> I happen to be convinced hell is not literally fire, but the agony of true separation from God. I say that because fire doesn't have degrees of punishment, but hell does.

This doesn't seem like a very good argument. First of all, there are obviously different degrees of fire (in terms of heat and size), as well as in terms of the extent of their effects. In fact, we even call them first, second, and third "degree" burns.

Secondly, it doesn't really seem like the Bible is just talking about being separated from God. The Greeks and Romans living nextdoor to the Jews and early Christians were "separate" from God, yet I don't think Jesus or any of his disciples would have said that they were living in "agony". Certainly they didn't sit around gnashing their teeth all day. Furthermore, the Bible is very clear about being tormented by fire and that there will be "no rest" from it. That sounds like a pretty far cry from just maintaining the status quo -- a life without God -- which, from my point of view, is perfectly fine.

> Because the wages of sin is death, therefore Jesus' death is exactly related to the crime and the punishment. It's a direct correlation.

This statement makes literally no sense to me. What does Jesus' death have to do with mine? Or my sins, for that matter?

[jimwalton]

> Let's imagine a third and more accurate case: someone claims that we have a debt of $1,000,000, passed on to us by an anonymous and wicked ancestor, which they agree to pay for us, on the condition that we worship them and are obedient them for the rest of our lives -- and on the stipulation that if we don't pay, we'll be tortured for eternity by our generous benefactor's father.

This is a severe misunderstanding. It's not that God says, "I'll pay if you worship, and if you don't, I torture you for eternity." Instead, what the Bible teaches is that God knows that your sin is leading you in a path of total destruction, and only recognizing the truth will save you. You seem to think God is just a megalomanic, but what He is is the truth, and without him there is nothing but destruction in your future. So he's standing at the edge of the cliff waving his arms, screaming for you to change directions, warning you of danger, showing his care. Instead of listening you say, "Who does that guy think he is? He thinks he knows everything. Why should I listen to him. He's just stuck on himself." See, that's not it at all; he knows the danger, and your only hope of survival is to listen to him.

> I'd consider it a violation of both privacy and freedom.

So if you owed someone $10 million, and another person offered to pay it for you, you'd refuse because it would infringe on your privacy and freedom? Hmm.

> Even if this were true, the "generosity" of the offer doesn't come without strings, nor is it really "free", since you'll be brutally punished for not making it.

See above. It's not "strings," but the facts of the situation. The cliff is ahead. Please change direction.

Through the pitch-black night, the captain sees a light dead ahead on a collision course with his ship. He sends a signal: "Change your course ten degrees east."

The light signals back: "Change yours, ten degrees west."

Angry, the captain sends: "I'm a Navy captain! Change your course, sir!"

"I'm a seaman, second class," comes the reply, "Change your course, sir."

Now the captain is furious. "I'm a battleship! I'm not changing course!"

There's one last reply. "I'm a lighthouse. Your call."

It's not that there are strings attached, but it's the reality of the situation.

> That's interesting, but isn't the punishment still for eternity? There is no real difference between a "few" blows or "more" blows if the punishment lasts forever.

Not necessarily. There are some theories out there that God will continue to attempt to reconcile the lost even after death, and that there may be mechanisms for the damned to not spend eternity there, but only an appropriate amount of time fitting what they did on earth.

But if I were you, I would avoid that situation entirely and make right with God now.

> Secondly, it doesn't really seem like the Bible is just talking about being separated from God.

This is the entire message of the Bible. What Adam and Eve lost in the Garden was not access to the Garden, but access to God's presence. God's presence is a theme that runs through the whole Bible. It's what the covenant is all about (all of the covenants), the tabernacle, the Temple, and even Jesus was "God with us."

People aren't sitting around gnashing their teeth now because on earth we are beneficiaries of God's general grace. Rain falls for all of us; we all benefit from the supply of food, the beauty of the environment, and the characteristic of our bodies to self-heal. But in the afterlife when these things are no longer available, it will be a completely different story.

[Conundrum]

> God has not just arbitrarily created a situation of owing Him something and then not giving you a way to pay it. Justice is part of the make-up of existence, and when we sinned we created a veritable imbalance.

Do you have any evidence for any of this? Otherwise, this is just empty claims and perhaps boldfaced lies.

> Scapegoats were temporary measures to alleviate a problem...

Temporarily punishing the innocent is still not just or fair

> What makes the sacrifice effective is that Jesus truly bore the sins of the world

What evidence do you have for this, or is this just another empty claim / boldfaced religious lie? Plenty of people have been pronounced dead and then surprised folks by going on living.

> Not sure what you mean by this... (regarding nature of punishment and nature of Jesus)

You say there's a punishment for sin, and it's death, well, everybody already dies, it's perfectly natural, how convenient, problem solved, no need for religion.

> God didn't sacrifice himself to appease himself. The Son sacrificed Himself, at the will of the Father, to appease the legal demands of sin on humanity.

Is there one deity or not? was Jesus a deity? Is the punishment separation from deity? This is not valid logic, it's just human hacking, a bunch of carefully constructed circular errors to get people to accept erroneous reasoning.

> Again you misunderstand. If the only perfect being is that which is uncreated (viz., God), then any created being is ipso facto less than perfect...

Depends on what your definition of perfect is. Also if the deity can be 3 people, why not more? Perhaps instead of creating imperfect things they could have just split into a nice pantheon of gods and seen how that went. Whoa is the limited deity for lack of imagination...

You make a lot of immense claims about unrealistic things for which you offer little but tall tales. Whatever exactly it is you believe, I suspect you've been coaxed all the way around some circular illogic to arrive back at a beginning to claim the circle perfect.

[jimwalton]

> "God has not just arbitrarily created a situation of owing Him something and then not giving you a way to pay it. Justice is part of the make-up of existence, and when we sinned we created a veritable imbalance." Do you have any evidence for any of this?

It's theological, not scientific. You wanted to know what Christians believe. This is what the Bible teaches, and so it's part of our theological base. It's not subject to laboratory research.

> Temporarily punishing the innocent is still not just or fair

The scapegoat was released into the wilderness. It's not punishment, but a symbol of removing the sins from the community. So there was nothing "not just or fair" about it.

> What evidence do you have for this, or is this just another empty claim / boldfaced religious lie?

Again, it's a theological teaching of the Bible. I don't what evidence you expect to hear for a theological teaching. I'll assume you've studied philosophy. It's the same thing. When Kierkegaard writes about the teleological suspension of the ethical, you don't say to him, "What evidence do you have? Prove it!" It's philosophical reasoning, not scientific reasoning.

> You say there's a punishment for sin, and it's death, well, everybody already dies, it's perfectly natural...

The death of which the Bible speaks in not the perfectly natural physical death. When God said to Adam and Eve, "On the day you shall eat of it, dying you shall die," he obviously wasn't talking about perfectly natural physical death, because they lived for quite a while longer.

> Is there one deity or not? was Jesus a deity?

I would hope, arguing with Christians as you are, that you have some understanding of the doctrine of the trinity.

> This is not valid logic, it's just human hacking, a bunch of carefully constructed circular errors to get people to accept erroneous reasoning.

Your accusation of human hacking betrays a lack of understanding. All people, including the disciples, Paul, the church fathers, and theologians, have struggled with the doctrine of the trinity. But the fact is that this is how God has revealed Himself, and we have a hard time finding natural analogies that help us understand it. I have heard some that are fairly good, but they all fall short eventually. We accept that light is both a particle and a wave, but that's not valid logic either. For the time we accept that classical physics and quantum mechanics are both true, because both have been proved, and yet they contradict each other. That doesn't mean it's human hacking.

> Depends on what your definition of perfect is.

In this case the definition would be "insusceptible to mistakes, wrong thinking, or wrongdoing." Because God is God, he is not susceptible. Because we are not God, we are inherently not insusceptible.

> Also if the deity can be 3 people, why not more?

Because He is what He is. You asking for an absurdity. The deity can't create more deity, because deity by theological definition is uncreated.

> You make a lot of immense claims about unrealistic things for which you offer little but tall tales.

Unfortunately this is your bias in coming to the conversation. You seem to want scientific evidence for theology, without which you shout "Tall tales!" But there's nothing circular about my reasoning.