GOD IS NOT JUST: ATONEMENT IN THE NEW TESTAMENT*

If by “just” one means a forensic, abstraction in which every crime/sin must receive appropriate punishment, then God is not just.  [This post follows up on my post of 8/25/23 in which I looked at some of the justice vocabulary in the Bible.]  Moreover, much of what people presume is atonement language about Jesus in the NT, particularly in Paul’s writings, is not atonement language.  It is not drawing on the atonement language and concepts used by ancient Israel in the OT, but on later foreign concepts (e.g. by Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, Bede.)  And, it matters.  What is often lost as people conflate God’s gracious offer of salvation with the more specific category of atonement is the order, the sequence, of God’s outreach of reconciliation.

The sequence in the OT is this.  First, God condescends in grace and mercy to offer relationship to Abraham, to Moses, to the people of Israel.  There is nothing said about those people being righteously qualified, and there is no atonement for their previous sin/s.#  In fact, Moses tells the people that they were chosen NOT because they were more righteous or powerful or numerous – in fact, they are “stiff-necked” (Deut 9:1-6).  God offered a covenant relationship with them simply because God was faithful to the promise he made to Abraham.

Second, when Abraham entrusted himself to God, God reckoned that response as righteousness (Gen 16:5); that is, a right relationship.  There is absolutely nothing in God’s dealings with Abraham, Moses, or Israel in which God responds as a courtroom judge who must first exact punishment for sin in order to make things “just.”#  That forensic concept is not there and should not be projected into the NT!

The third step takes us into atonement language proper.  As people in relationship with the Holy God, they are called to be holy as well, but they, like us all, fail.  So, God established the symbolic atonement system.  This system was basically adopted from the sacrificial symbolism of the surrounding cultures, BUT was changed to remove polytheistic, magical, and nature-god elements.  In brief, the atonement system attempted to convey the seriousness of intangible realities such as sin and forgiveness through dramatic rituals.  The seriousness of sin, disobedience to God, was portrayed as a kind of miasma that polluted God’s dwelling place, the temple, and was such an impediment, if not removed, that God’s Presence would depart.  Blood, represented life and was manipulated around altars to symbolically overcome and remove the filth of sin.  This system symbolized God’s mercy and grace to forgive and to reconcile.  Of course, those making sin offerings were to be repentant, to desire reconciliation, and to want to be obedient in the future.
Here are a couple of key corrective thoughts about the sin offerings and scapegoat rituals for atonement:

·        Sins were not transferred or “imputed” from the person to the animal; that would involve forbidden magical thinking.  [To follow in a later post: This is why, for example, Paul does not say that Jesus became sin, but rather that Jesus became the “sin offering” in 2Cor 5:21 (see Rom 8:3) and why a common assumption that our sin could be imputed onto Jesus would be a foreign concept to Paul and other Jews.]

·        The death of the sin-offering animal is not key; the blood is.  The “life” in the blood (see Lev17:11) was greater than the deadly effects of sin.  Jesus provided the blood of a spotlessly pure sacrifice.  [Again, for a later post:  The actual death of Jesus is key symbolically for other reasons, but not as being punished for our sins to satisfy a god who is bound to an abstract system of forensic justice.]

Note: In Rom 4:18-25, Paul includes Gentiles in the “hope” of Abraham (18) and applies atonement language to all “who believe in Him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, who was delivered over on account of our sins [understood as the sin offering] and was raised for the sake of our righteousness/justification” (24-25).

Application: The order, the sequence, of God’s outreach of reconciliation always demonstrates the grace and mercy of God who does NOT execute abstract justice on people (or on Jesus) but, rather, who lifts/cleanses/buries/casts into the sea, etc. the sin of those who entrust themselves, who repent and seek forgiveness, who walk in obedience with God.

Lord, help me to always cherish your unfathomable mercy and grace such that you would allow me to abide in your Presence.  Help me to show that mercy to others.  Amen.

#Some interpreters and translators misunderstand a reference in Rom 3:25 to God “passing over” sins of the past as leaving “unpunished” (see NIV Original, but rendered better in the later version).  The term paresin used here is about remitting a debt rather than negligently forgetting it.  It is another image of God’s offer of forgiveness.  Actually, anyone who has really forgiven another person knows what it is like not to exact punishment, but to “pass over” the transgression.

*I have a detailed exegetical treatment of some of the key statements of Romans 3 in Part 2 of “Hope for the Future of New Testament Theology,” in Religions 2021, 12(11), 975; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12110975