So what is forgiveness? Sharon Baker, in her new book (Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught About God’s Wrath and Judgment), asks this question and makes this point: In serving retributive justice, the offense would be held on to tightly, not forgiven unless and until the offender balanced the accounts through payback of some [Read More...]
Traditional Christian thinking has a fundamental belief in retributive justice at work in its concepts about grace, forgiveness, and even love. Let’s be clear here: The sacrificial system required, for God to forgive, a sacrifice that cost the person something and someone had to pay; both satisfaction and substitutionary atonement theories conceptualize God’s grace, God’s [Read More...]
Paul Louis Metzger, in Leadership, writes about “biblical justice” and defines it like this:
Biblical justice involves making individuals, communities, and the cosmos whole, by upholding both goodness and impartiality. It stands at the center of true religion, according to James, who says that the kind of “religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world” (James 1:27). Earlier Scripture says, “The righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern” (Prov. 29:7).
I have a thing for this term justice so let me give a brief on the term: [Read more...]