Beyond the Abyss 4

Admittedly, this is not the typical way to start off a Monday morning, but we are going through Sharon Baker’s book, and the topic she deals with — the justifiability or unjustifiability of hell — is a serious topic and one worthy of our best thinking.

In chp 3 of Sharon Baker’s Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught About God’s Wrath and Judgment, examines the sense of justice in the Bible.

She takes aim first at Deuteronomy 28, the famous chp that lists the blessings for obedience and the curses for disobedience. Her observation: “Real tit-for-tat theology here, retributive justice at its worst” (31). Then she turns on Jeremiah and sees God ranting and raving …

Then to a seminary professor who evidently got mad at her in class and said God was full of WRATH and that she needed to get rid of the idea of God’s love. Sheesh…

Sodom and Gomorrah… the flood… and hell, too.

It’s about retributive justice, and she’s big-time against retributive justice because it conflicts with restorative justice. This leads her to yet another theme: forgiveness.

This is a bit theoretical but here’s a big one: Does forgiveness by God always involve the taking care of injustices first? In other words, does the God of the Bible (and most of Christian theology) require first a retributive justice before forgiveness occurs?

My own question is this: Does not the fact that God himself absorbs this injustice in himself (and therefore not exact that punishment on us) revolutionize forgiveness? Instead of exacting punishment in a retributive sense, which is always bad for Baker, is it not the case that God absorbs the injustices in himself? Does not God really just forgive us and not require anything from us? How is that not forgiveness? And can you think of one passage in the Bible about God where he forgives apart from taking care of justice too? Isn’t this the point of Romans 3, where Paul says God must be both “just and the justifier?” Has Baker understood how forgiveness is framed in the Bible? Isn’t it gracious of God to forgive us by his own “self-denying absorption”? And isn’t that exactly how we forgive? Don’t we self-deny in order to forgive?

She doesn’t believe forgiveness is genuine forgiveness if God must first punish sin or settle the justice books before he can forgive. At work in traditional views of forgiveness is an economic quid pro quo.

She has a major problem with Jesus’ parable of the unforgiving servant because it suggests that to be forgiven we must forgive. She sees here, and in the Lord’s Prayer, an economy of retributive forgiveness.

Which leads her into atonement theories and in each of them — Christus victor, satisfaction, moral exemplar (Abelard), and penal substitution (which she seems always to connect first to Calvin before Luther) — and sees in each of them a retributive justice and an economic exchange. Thus, each presents forgiveness after justice has been satisfied.