Vicarious Atonement

[seer]

Have you guys been through the theories of atonement lately? I hold to Vicarious Atonement - that Christ was our substitute - taking on our rightful punishment. I will post various proof texts this evening. But feel free to get the ball rolling...

Off to work...

[AcousticJS]

Is this any different to penal substitution, or are they just different terms to describe the same idea?

[Tercel]

From a biblical perspective, a couple of major problems I see with Vicarious Atonement/Penal Substitution (basically same thing) is this:
There are lots of different types of motifs, metaphors and imagery used in the New Testament relation to Christ and his Work. Supporters of Vicarious Atonement pick out those verses that could be taken to imply their ideas and then conclude that the Bible teaches Vicarious Atonement, and ignore the other passages. Such a method is unsound and can be used to prove just about anything.

Other Christians throughout history have chosen to seize on a different thing. Popular in the 4th century was Jesus as our “ransom”, where Jesus offered his soul to the devil in exchange for our soul. Popular also at that time was view where Christ is like a champion fighter who takes on and defeats the forces of evil and powers of darkness. Without any difficulty you can find heaps of proof-texts for these views. But each of these ideas explains some of the passages at the expensive of failing to explain others.

In the case of Vicarious Atonement, for example, if we accept it as the model of the atonement, what sense do passages such as the following then make?
Col 2:15 He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it [the cross].
Heb 2:14-15 Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.

Sure some of the language occasionally used is judicial. But does that justify saying that the entire atonement is, at its essence, judicial?

E.P. Sanders, for example, observes what he calls “participatory” language (eg us “dying with Christ”, Rom 6), and notes that it crops up regularly with regard to the atonement. He addresses the question of whether the judicial or the participatory paradigm is the more basic of the two. He makes the following arguments (Paul and Palestinian Judaism pg 503):
1) Participatory language is the more frequent of the two
2) a) The Jewish repentance and forgiveness terminology is lacking, if that is the paradigm being used.
b) The word “guilt” doesn’t ever appear anywhere relevant.
c) The analysis of the problem of “transgression” in Rom 1-3 doesn’t finish with the conclusion that man is guilty before God but rather that man is “under sin” (3:9). The solution given correspondingly isn’t that God forgives the transgression and removes the guilt, but that man dies to the power of sin by dying united with Christ.
3) Paul’s arguments assume that transgressions exclude people from the kingdom not because of their law-breaking nature, but because they establish participatory unions incompatible with the union with Christ.
4) Paul’s judicial language sometimes becomes subservient to the participationist categories, but never vice versa.

As a result of this Sanders advocates a rather weird atonement theory involving our mystical spiritual union with Christ. I think Sanders is essentially correct in observing the primacy of the participationist language over the judicial (but I think he errs in his interpretation of what is meant by the participation language and that he interprets it far more spiritually and mystically than it is meant).

[Kevin Wayne]

Seer I've bumped my Atonement Models thread - take a look @it...