if it were up to me, then i'd rather not participate in this thread simply for the fact that the opening post is so long and as such (in order to both do justice to the individual who started this thread and for the nature of the discussion) my post would have to be considerably longer. writing long posts isn't something i particularly like doing but given that it still feels as though the member who started this thread still has not received an appropriate answer, i might as well expound the christian logic as it comes to the matter of forgiveness and the atonement. that said, i'll try to quote the relevant sections of your post and if it feels like i've missed something, then i am more than willing to make another post specifically on the matter.
Well, I guess it is the thought that counts—for us fallible and imperfect mortals, who are capable of being so foolish. God, on the other hand, is the one Being from whom we know we definitely cannot expect such silliness. And yet if I were to believe in the substitution doctrine of Christianity, the core concept of the whole religion, established unequivocally all up and down the entire New Testament (Matthew 26:28, Galatians 1:4, 1 John 2:2, 1 John 4:10, Revelation 1:5, 1 Peter 2:24), then I would have to believe something extremely comparable to our bizarre little episode with the punching. God, according to Christian thought, cannot or will not simply let bygones be bygones when he forgives someone their sins. In other words, he has to forgive without forgiving. Someone still has to be punished for your sins when God pardons you of them, and who better to be punished for sinning than a man who’s never sinned before in his entire life?
it should first be stated that the matter isn't at all as simple as you make it seem. before we can even at all begin speaking of forgiveness, we ought first speak of how the being of god, and the concepts of sin and forgiveness are understood within christianity. the caveat here is that in entering this discussion, i am not at all trying to make you believe this, but merely only trying to give a logical basis for the christian belief. if it is the case that such a thing is accomplished then my task is done and your article will have been refuted. now, with that out of the way, we can move on.
(note: what follows is partly what i have written on this subject for a different purpose and given that it is not native to this thread i will place it in italics)
god: More than simply being the entity who sustains everything in existence, adherents of both the aforementioned Abrahamic faiths maintain that God is life itself (John 1:4). Furthermore, his will is as such that we should live and to do so in full (John 10:10), hence why he has decreed certain commandments to our benefit. If God wishes that we should live and makes provisions for us to truly live then it follows that each commandment is the pathway to life itself (Deut. 30:19). [...] Christians believe that God is the possessor of attributes such as power, knowledge, holiness etc. Now given that God is infinite, it follows that his very attributes are infinite as well such that he not only possess power but all power (Jer. 16:21), not only knowledge but all knowledge (Romans 11:33), he is not moderately holy but all-holy (Ezek. 39:7). Furthermore, the quality of being infinite is as such that there can be no moment at all where his divine attributes are not exhibited in his self. By this I mean that, as he is in himself, at no point can he fail to know all things, or fail to be omnipotent, nor to be infinitely just or infinitely merciful etc. He is always and completely the measure of his attributes at all times without ceasing to be one in order to exhibit the other.
sin: In just a few words, sin is the breaking of God’s sovereign law. Yet more than that, if the commandments are the pathway to life itself, then the going against them can only mean and most certainly be, death. I will speak a bit further of sin seeing as having a deeper appreciation of sin is absolutely crucial to this discussion. As the commandments are life, sin is death. Sin is the complete reversal of the decrees of God, it is the imposition of the human will above that of the divine and it is an affront to God’s wisdom, love, and goodness. In fact, it is the opposition to God’s very purpose for us and life cannot truly be had outside of the design which God has implemented. As such sin not only merits punishment (hell) but demands it—this is the inevitable outcome. It is not that God is bad—rather, God is good and we are bad and being goodness itself, God upholds good and this is why he has to punish evil. The punishment of evil, no matter how we may particularly feel about it, is good. I stress this over and over again because it is imperative that the outcome of sin be not reduced to the mere arbitrary will of God but rather that it’s result be understood as a logical conclusion. Once more, logic and justice are as such that sin inevitably and always, leads to death. If God is life, and sin is the disconnect to that life, how could the decision to sin not be consummated in death?
The bible describes sin as a debt whose method of payment and price is death (Romans 6:23, Hebrews 9:22) and God, since he is infinitely holy and just, requires that sin be punished; that all debts be paid. Now the nature of a debt is as such that he who has no debt can pay the debt of another. This is because a debt (in a manner of speaking) is extraneous to the individual and hence the individual is not levied for something that is absolutely inherent to his self but rather he is levied for a property that is wholly contingent to his being. In just the same way, while everyone is born with sin, sin itself is not absolutely inherent to the human being and thus is not a non-contingent property that the human would possess in every possible world (ie. we can imagine a possible world where humans do not sin such as heaven or pre-fall Eden). Therefore, given that sin is an extrinsic quality, it is possible and perfectly logical for a third party to pay the debt of sin belonging to another. Hence the feasibility of animal sacrifices in the Old Testament (Leviticus 5:11, Leviticus 17:11).
To better illustrate this point, think of renting an apartment. Now imagine that through various circumstances you have spent your savings to the point that you are not able to pay any of your bills, much less the cost of renting your apartment. Given your great debt, it is impossible for you to pay your own debt and neither is it fair for the government (while it would be within their power) to just pretend that you did not owe them anything (i.e. simply forgive), for that would not be a display of justice. While you would not be able to pay the debt, it would be possible for someone else (such as a parent or brother) to step in and pay the debt for you so that justice would be served (and mercy bestowed on you) and you would not be left in the miserable situation that you had placed yourself in; in full view of your loving parent and/or relative.
While the above analogy does convey the overall message of the gospel, it is not perfect in its transmission. According to the word of God, the debt accrued due to sin is infinite. Simply a moments thought will suffice for one to understand why this is so. Every time an individual sins, they do so primarily against God (Psalm 51:4, Acts 5:1-16) and how could the punishment for sinning against a being of infinite worth be anything less than infinite in return? The Bible also says that everyone has sinned (Romans 3:23) hence that bars anyone else from stepping in and paying another’s debt to God. Yet aside from being just, God is also infinitely loving, and while it would be perfectly fair for him to condemn the entire world to hell, that would not be an expression of love. This is why he, being the only individual who could possibly lead a perfectly sinless life and satisfy a debt of infinite value, chose to pay the price for mankind (John 3:16).
[...] Christianity portrays God as acting in complete harmony with all his divine attributes such that he does not have to cease displaying one attribute (such as infinite justice) in order to exhibit another (such as infinite mercy). Through Christ’s death on the cross, every single sin, that in this case, a believer commits, is consistently punished by the full force of the rightfully deserved wrath of God that is reserved for all manner of ungodliness. The Christian understanding is as such that sin is always—and I mean always—punished with it’s inevitable result, death. The Christian God never fails to exemplify his attributes of holiness and justice to the full, there is never an instance where he fails to be just in order to be merciful yet thanks to the cross, neither is there ever an instance where God fails to be merciful in order to be just. Rather, the cross enables God to consistently be both simultaneously. Sin is always justly punished and undeserved mercy is always given to fallible man. The concept of sacrifice, inherent in the concept of death and punishment, is imperative to justice. Sin has to be punished, therefore sacrifice is always required yet thanks to the death of Christ, sacrifice is consistently dealt (rather, a sacrifice of infinite worth was dealt once and for all) and thus enabling God to display his mercy to fallible man without compromising his justice. Therefore, Christians believe in a God who is consistent with his self and escapes the trap of pitting one divine attribute against another.
God, according to Christian thought, cannot or will not simply let bygones be bygones when he forgives someone their sins. In other words, he has to forgive without forgiving.
the above comes on the heels of your example of forgiving your friend. the problem with that is that it completely disregards the fact that god is the ultimate standard in the universe and as such he necessarily upholds the good. just as he is necessarily omnipotent, omniscient and omnisapient etc. he by necessity is also the very upholder of justice. given that justice is part of his very being, it is necessarily infinite and if it is indeed infinite then it could not at all be exhibited limitedly (kind of along the lines that given that god is perfect, he could not at any point be anything less than perfect). he is not somewhat just but rather all-just. seeing as he is all-just and sin by its logical conclusion (as a disconnect to the life-giving commandments of god can only end in death) then we find ourselves with a case where every guilty individual must merit death. if you and i agree that god is infinite justice, then as with all his other attributes (such that he is always just, always all-knowing etc.), he must be infinitely just consistently and such a scenario ends in hell for all humanity. yet given the cross, god is able to display both justice and mercy consistently.
The Muslim God on the other hand has to set one infinite attribute in opposition to another. I mean, we understand that the proper punishment for sin is death and that justice is not synonymous to mercy. When Allah forgives, he displays mercy, but he does not display justice and vice versa. Where Allah does forgive, there is no provision in Islam that enables sin to always and consistently end in the natural conclusion that is demanded by both logic and justice—death. Hence, Islam presents us with a god who is in contradiction with himself. There is no unison or harmony to his being to the point where he is forced to have one infinite attribute trump another. Not only is Allah’s contradiction one of ontological proportions, but logical as well. To illustrate, it is understood that to have an infinite being who is the possessor of certain attributes signifies that those attributes are exemplified infinitely (part of this concept is the understanding that such attributes have to be present at all times) yet Allah only exemplifies his attributes of infinite justice and mercy (among others) limitedly and at the degradation of the other. (One must ask themselves how it can be that one infinite attribute can at all be pitted against the other and in so doing go so far as trump it’s opposite. If these attributes be infinite, then they cannot be limited much less be cancelled out by the other for that would violate the law of non-contradiction. Seeing as Allah has need to, and in fact does, cease to exhibit one property for the other, it follows that as the fullness of these attributes go, Allah does not possess them in their entirety. This of course puts into question his claims of being infinite in any respect. But I digress.) He is unable to be consistent with his self and is resolved to compromise his own attributes (and as such, his grandeur) in order to be able to deal with his creation. This is quite the scary thought, that justice itself has to stoop down to the level of injustice so that a certain end might be met—if such a prospect weren’t so sad I’d be led to call it the grossest display of pure, unadulterated evil. Evil, because according to the ramifications of the Muslim philosophy, Ultimate Justice is not averse to becoming unjust, for the sake of his worshipers. Where justice, ceases to be just; you only have the most heinous evil.
The God of Islam is helpless when it comes to the manner in which he can reconcile harmony in his being with the punishment and mercy he allots to his creation. The picture we are presented with in Islam is of a God that cannot be true to himself and in fact utterly lacks justice when he forgives, and completely lacks mercy when he deals justly with the reality of sin. His lack of justice is evident in the fact that he will not punish sin as is demanded by logic, his goodness, justice, and his holiness and is wont to sweep a person’s sins under the rug, so to speak. Such that the travesty and deviation of his design and purpose is never put to right but simply ignored.
( a ) Forgiveness ought to be like a cancelled note—torn in two, and burned up, so that it never can be shown against one.” Yet instead of perceiving forgiveness in this very accurate and rational way, Christian dogma—to use the cliché that Christians themselves are always using— ( b )instead misrepresents forgiveness as a note of debt transferred from one person who cannot pay it to a loving volunteer who can.
( a ) in the above you completely ignore the concept of justice. forgiveness is mercy, it is not justice and if god's attributes are infinite, then there is no point at which he can fail to be just (just as there is no point at which he can fail to be all-powerful etc.) and once again, mercy and justice quite often are in opposition to one another. you believe in a deity who has to pick between the two and cannot be either just or merciful at the same time---there simply is no harmony in his divine nature. your points make sense when one focuses only on one attribute of god yet when they try to reconcile this with his other attributes your whole argument unravels.
( b ) are you going to argue that sin is not a debt? if it isn't a debt than why is the sinner punished? why will the polytheists face an eternity in hell? it is because they have a debt to pay and a debt against an infinite being is itself infinite. if sin is not a debt and as such it need not be logically repaid to god then why would he keep individuals in hell forever? simply for the sheer enjoyment? or is it because the logical nature of things such as shirk require that this debt be paid. so then even in islam sin is viewed as a debt to god (for if it weren't then god would have no business setting the matter right either through forgiveness or punishment) and as such this point fails as well.
Precisely. Forgiveness is the erasure of moral debt altogether, not a transfer of it from one party to another. Christianity is supposedly a religion centered entirely on grace yet the Christian definition of grace tries to have it both ways, and in doing so attributes both utmost injustice and gross, puzzling impracticality and unreasonability to the Almighty—a savage version of the Almighty who absolutely demands that blood be spilled, even if it is innocent blood.
once again your point fails when we try to harmonize the above understanding with the other attributes of god--such as infinite justice. mercy is not justice (for justice means getting what you deserve and forgiveness is something that no one deserves). the fact is that whenever the muslim deity displays justice, he does not display mercy and whenever he displays mercy, he does not display justice. your god cannot be consistent in his own being and he is in utter conflict as it regards his divine attributes. he cannot even be said to be infinitely just or infinitely merciful for his attributes regularly trump the other as it comes to his divine nature. once again, your points all sound well when we only examine the attribute of mercy, but when we try to couple what you've said with the being of god in general we find that these all fall flat on their face.
When you explain all this to a Christian they will invariably, as sure as night follows day and water flows downhill, give one of two responses (often both). The first is an appeal to their bizarre misconception that the Old Testament animal sacrifices somehow presaged the crucifixion. Like the majority of the so-called Messianic prophecies this is just retroactive reinterpretation, completely unheard of before the advent of Christianity itself. Barring this, if the animal sacrifices sufficed for the people of the past, there’s no reason why they should not suffice for the people of the present. As such, even if you grant the animal sacrifice defense the crucifixion would still be pointless, as the only thing God would have to do is either continue having animals be sacrificed throughout history or make the incarnation and atonement happen within the first generation after the Fall. Otherwise you’re stuck with absurd cop-out that the crucifixion saved people before it ever took place, lest you think everyone in that part of history automatically condemned for happening to be born at a certain time.
the animal sacrifices never saved anyone, rather they were meant as to symbolize the death of christ. everyone who has been saved since the beginning of history has been saved through the blood of christ. the bible is quite clear that all our burdens were laid on him and contrary to what you imply, no act of changing the past would have to have occurred. if sin is a debt then whenever the debt is paid rests entirely on the individual to whom the debt is owed. if i sincerely believe that in a week from now, a family member will pay your debt to me then i certainly can wait until the next week to receive my payment. let us not forget that with god, a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like a day. but furthermore, throughout your entire post you simply ignore the concept of justice altogether. can you please show us how at all your conception of forgiveness squares with the notion of justice?
But such an interpretation of animal sacrifice is completely nonsensical to begin with. Sin cannot be transferred from one creature to another like a transfusion of diseased blood. Sin is a kind of action, the result of personal choice. To transfer sin from one party to another (be the other party an animal or a God-man) would have to mean changing both party’s pasts by causing each party to have made the other's choices instead. Time travel into the past might allow one to do the trick: the only thing stabbing a cow would accomplish is having there being one fewer cow at present. When the Old Testament refers to the sacrificed animal as representing sin it doesn’t mean that literally. Watching the animal die was like watching your sin die, symbolic of God’s actual forgiveness, which came about because in performing the sacrifice you knew you were performing a ritual act of repentance. Otherwise why would the animal be quickly killed instead of being tortured to death for a whole day like Jesus (P) was supposed to have been? If it was just the death and not the pain that did the trick then no stations of the cross would have been necessary; Jesus (P) could’ve just offered himself to be swiftly decapitated by the guards who came to catch him and that’s that. The idea (as established in the biblical passages cited above) is that he was suffering instead of us, which is silly for more reasons than just the one I already explained about this substitution being a needless, graceless act of refusal to forgive. There is yet another problem still, one so obvious that I am puzzled it doesn’t get brought up more often.
that is actually incorrect. sin is a debt and in fact is not intrinsic to the individual. the nature of a debt is as such that it can in fact be paid by a third party and as such the above is once again refuted. there need not be any actual change to one's past in the same manner that when the parent pays the rent of their child to get them out of debt, it would not mean that it was actually the parent who had been late on their payments.
Being flogged, crowned with thorns, whacked with a reed, marched across town, and crucified for nine hours is serious business indeed (if it did happen) but by no means is it the grand total of all the suffering that everyone who has ever lived or ever will live deserve for every single sin ever committed in past, present, and future. Even if sin could be transferred, there have been too many sins overall to squeeze them all into such a relatively meager amount of suffering. Heck, there’s probably been more than one individual person who has deserved those exact torments. To punish a single person for every wrongdoing in history would probably take longer than a single person could live. I know that there is no official objective means of measuring this but try to be honest with yourself: isn’t it supposed to be one eye for one eye? Wouldn’t a crucifixion be a fitting punishment only for one person’s unethically crucifying someone, and one bout of torture for one equivalent bout of torture? For heaven’s sake, people, even in the Gospels themselves the perpetrators marvel at what little time the whole thing took (Mark 15:44), and this is supposed to be punishment for every crucifixion, every murder, every rape, every hoarding of every miser, every act of perjury, every act of adultery, every swindling, robbery, vehicular manslaughter, obscene phone call, and Michael Bay movie from the dawn of man till Judgment Day?! Give me a crown of thorns, a beating, and a nine hour crucifixion over what happened to Rasputin any day.
clearly you do not possess an adequate understanding of the atonement. the true suffering did not consist of being nailed to the cross, or flogged, beaten etc. but rather in the wrath of god which flows from the justice of god being meted out on the person of christ. the punishment was to the very soul and whatever physical suffering coming from a crucifixion would be trivial in comparison. the matter of time need not be an issue for if christ is himself infinite in his own being than it is perfectly possible to experience an infinite amount of suffering in a finite period. in other posts around this forum you mention how well you understood christianity yet i have not seen this knowledge displayed within your post at all. the manner in which you end the above sentence is actually quite telling in how you seemed to have never understood the matter you so casually make light of at all. where did you get such an understanding?
Perhaps another plug-in is needed. Let us say that I told you about a murder trial in which the automatic penalty in the case of a conviction is death, barring a pardon from the judge. (This judge, by the way, is someone that you respect and trust a great deal.) A pardon is exactly what the culprit gets. The judge grants him the pardon, bangs his gavel, and everyone starts to rise from their seats because they naturally think that the whole thing is over. But then, with the very next bang of his gavel, the judge pronounces a death sentence on himself. You ask me, in response to hearing this tale, why the judge would do such a thing, how he could do such a thing. I tell you that the law demands that someone has to be put to death when a capital crime is committed and since the judge pardoned the culprit he is naturally obligated to execute himself instead. You protest the logic to me (well, be honest with yourself: wouldn’t you?) and I say, “Look, they’ve been doing something like this since ancient times and this is just fulfilling the tradition. The law demands that this go on. The judge himself wrote that law. Who are you to argue with it?” What would your reaction be? To assume that I must be wrong about a judge as good and wise as you believe this one to be ever authoring such a law? Or would you think that that my story about the judge, and maybe also the very existence of the law I spoke of, isn’t true? Or that you have been gravely mistaken about this judge being good and wise in the first place? Or would you just shrug and go, “Oh well, I guess that’s good enough for me. Want to go out for pizza?”
i have seen an argument along these lines elsewhere and they only work as long as one misrepresents the atonement and the concept of forgiveness. you do not understand that sin is twofold, there is the immediate consequences for sin (which primarily deals with making restitution with each other), and the eternal consequences for sin (which means making restitution to god). if i kill an individual, i can in fact pay for my crime according to our laws by giving my life in exchange. while i would have 'satisfied' the immediate consequence of my sin to the victim (as far as earthly law is concerned) i would not have satisfied the eternal consequence of my sin for that is against god and god being infinite, the sin against him requires a payment that is infinite in return. christ came to save us from this payment and not the immediate one (if he had saved us from the immediate payment then christians would not need to make restitutions towards other individuals) and as such your example does not work. if we were to be consistent, the judge could not take on the punishment of the guilty individual because the immediate payment would not have been paid. as such, your analogy fails for it confuses the consequences of sin that christians believe had been paid by christ.
i'm sure that i've ignored some other things in your post but i'm certainly willing to focus on them later should you feel these to be pertinent to the discussion.
