The Atonement Part 10: Legal Atonement Framework 2 of 2- Imputation

Major issues with the double imputation paradigm:   

 The assumption of perfection as the goal rather than what Genesis says: Imaging God (defined as relationship, vocation, and allegiance). If you are building on the wrong foundation, you’ll always get the wrong answers.  

 Punishment as a prerequisite to forgiveness. The bible states that God forgives and casts sin away. It never states that punishment is pre-requisite for forgiveness. This is payment and not forgiveness.  o The assumption of the sinner needing to have sin punished rather than sin healed. In the Bible as we have shown sin is seen more as “biological” than as a “statutory crime”. In the OT sin stains or taints or infects like a disease. You don’t punish a disease out of someone. You kill the disease to heal the person.  

 Righteousness is assumed to be a substance that can be passed from one person to another in the reformed outlook. This is absent in the text.  

 Our sins being imputed but at the same time washed away is a contradiction.  

 God seeing you as Jesus is problematic. God is essentially participating in a lie. A legal fiction. The Bible says that God sees all things so if he does to know we are a sinner but pretend otherwise would go against the nature of God as described in scripture. 

  We are called slaves to sin, but we need to pay the debt to God… is God the author of sin? 

 The issue of the Torah that says sons should not suffer for the sins of their fathers and each should die for their own sins. God also wouldn’t allow Moses to give up his life on behalf of Israel. Does God break Torah to make this framework work? \

 The phrase “righteousness of Christ” is never mentioned in scripture. This is not to say that he is not righteous. He is called the righteous one (the faithful covenant partner). But if we are looking for Christ’s righteousness becoming ours, we never see this transaction in a single verse in scripture. 

 The trinitarian issues in this model are outside of orthodoxy. The father and son always act in unison and not against each other. This model has the father punishing the son. This is a split in the trinity or at the least disunity in the Godhead.   

    Logically the courtroom analogy makes no scene in this context… o The judge’s righteousness is in doing what is right and making a proper judgement o When either the plaintiff or the defendant is declared ‘righteous’ at the end of the case, there is no sense that in either case the judge’s own righteousness or anyone else’s has been passed on to them, by imputation, impartation, or any other process. What they have is a status of ‘righteous’ which comes from the judge. So having God’s righteousness as an alien righteousness or Christ’s righteousness makes no logical sense in the analogy.  o Even if we do take a courtroom view… God makes the judgement that we are in the right. We aren’t punished though we may deserve to be punished. We are forgiven, there’s no debt owed, its simply gone. We still aren’t receiving anyone else’ righteousness and perfection is not the foundation. The analogy fails on many levels. 

  It is individualistic. The Biblical framework when read in cultural context is always about the group. ANE and 1st century people didn’t identify so much as individuals as we do in the West. They thought of themselves as part of the larger group.