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Can God Forgive Sin?


This is a summary of a discussion on Facebook from ... like ... 12 years ago.  Came across it recently and like it, so here you go.  

Original Post: 

It occurs to me that in the system called "Penal Substitution" or "Vicarious Atonement" that the Father is both: 

A) incapable of forgiving and 
B) has never forgiven anyone. 

If you pay for a crime, or a crime is paid for, forgiveness is not necessary. Since "Jesus paid it all," then the Father did not need to forgive us. Indeed, the fact that Jesus was required to pay it was BECAUSE the Father was unable to forgive us. 

Man ... what a cool God!

Discussion:

Person 1: ‎...and not only that, after God accepts the full sacrifice of His Son for "payment in full" THEN He sends people to hell anyway, so they're going to hell for "paid-for offenses". Heck, not even human justice permits double jeopardy.

Me: This is true. Along the same lines, it is fair for God to condemn all humanity to Hell for the sin of one before they are born, but somehow unjust for the death of Christ to redeem all ... 'cause that's just stoopid.

Person 2: Besides all the above... Penal substitution doesn't *save* anybody's soul. It doesn't render anybody whole or safe or free from his sins; it doesn't make anybody righteous or holy or give any kind of hope at all. It leaves man eternally guilty, sinful and broken... but pardoned. So broken, sinning, guilty man, eternally bound by his passions and sins, wears a happy-face mask that says "But I'm Forgiven" and God agrees to the legal fiction, and the Resurrection is full of the same jerks we are now.

Me: Yes. I get the image of being this blood-covered turd hanging out in heaven with a bunch of saints hoping kind of hiding in the back so no one smells me. "I'm not perfect, just ... well ... really not perfect."

Person 2:  All snark and triumphalism aside, I have asked a number of evangelicals over the years: if God only *declares* you righteous, and pardons you only on the basis of sentence having been carried out; and if there's no possibility of repentance or change after death; then in what way is a Christian *not* condemned to be eternally no more holy in concrete, real-life ways, than he is now? Is man only *positionally* holy and righteous but in real-life experience eternally stuck as he is now? 

The response I've gotten several times, after some thought on their part, is that death is an instant sanctifier. Being cut off from the body makes a person instantly good and holy. Which to me seems to imply that the body is the evil that we need to be saved from, a la Manichaeism.

Me: What I was led to believe (as an Evangelical) was that the instant sanctification that happened at death was kind of an instant purgatory. All sin is instantaneously burned away. It was important to know it was instantaneous (not 10 to 20 years for such and such sin). Often, my dad would talk about getting to heaven "with smoke on your clothes." I'm actually kind of ok with that.

Person 3:  ‎"Systems" don't forgive. We describe what we think we see happening, theologically, but we fall short; in fact it is my firm opinion that anyone saved will be saved DESPITE, not because of his theology - even if it's the very best human understanding of theology that can be attained. Thankfully, salvation is not IQ- or philosophical-inclination-dependent. "We see in part."

The human mind complicates things...for instance, God can't need us to do penance; but somehow we feel the need to, no matter how very Protestant we may be. There is no Biblical case for Purgatory - but C.S. Lewis (among others) built a pretty logical one - we don't WANT to arrive "just as we are". Yet self-change (beyond a certain rather modest limits!) is hopeless, and the divine change in us cannot possibly be "done" within the few short years of a human life...plus Dante wrote a very beautiful poem about Purgatory, and Lewis wrote "The Great Divorce", and both (though doubtless theological misunderstandings with half-truths or lesser fractions) seem to witness to important Christian truth.

"Smoke on your clothes". I like that.

Person 4: Em, er, where did you people find this “God”??? Yowser!!

Person 3: If you make one up to your own preferences, it comes out cleaner and more immediately "rational" - but that falls short in the long run, not to mention contradicting at least two out of the Big Ten Rules.

Me: ‎@Person 3, you said "God can't need us to do penance; but somehow we feel the need to." I agree completely. One of my favorite movies, "The Mission," has a scene where a slavedriving fratricide climbs a waterfall with all his collected armor and weapons slung over his back ... it's powerful. (This is the scene.  The specific line starts at about 8 minutes.) Yes, we need to do penance. No, God does not need us to do it. Regarding Dante and Lewis, there's an important difference between the two. In the former, God has banished and is punishing those in Hell. In the latter, Hell is locked from the inside. 

@Person 4, I found that God every Sunday and at my father's knee. To deny that God was tantamount to denying Christianity. But I was glad to do so.

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