This was one of a series of replies to a blog post by Scot McKnight here: patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed … ild-abuse/
“I concur and you have raised a critical point which bears on the larger logic of Romans. How can God be just and justify all (Rom 5:12-21) or have mercy on all (Rom 11:32)? This seems to me to be the question asked and answered in Romans. If God’s justice is conceived within a sacrificial framework then God is unjust to justify all. Justice requires redress or punishment, thus PSA advocates read Rom 3:23-26, particularly ‘hilasterion’ as the place where God’s justice occurs (punishment for sin and its consequence death). In order to accommodate or ameliorate the apparent universalism of Paul in Rom. 5 and 11, this justice only applies to the ‘one who believes.’ In this model, God is just inasmuch as God really only justifies those who accept the sacrificial logic of the ‘atoning process.’ However, I don’t see Paul moving in this direction. May I quote Hamerton-Kelly here at this point?
“This means that substitution has become representation; Christ the perfect victim does not bear the wrath instead of us in the sense that we therefore need not bear it; rather as perfect representative he represents our wrath to us, in the sense of mirroring the decoded double transference. To bear it in our place would be to continue to hide our violence from us and thus perpetuate the deception of the double transference.” (Sacred Violence, 80)
I understand H-K to be saying that Romans 3:23-26 is not about Jesus being a substitute in the Anselmian sense but a substitute in the sense of ‘corporate personality’, the second Adam if you will.
How can a God who justifies all freely be truly just? That to me seems to be the real question. The Pauline solution is to ‘enfold’ the entire human race into the Adamic narrative and its mimetic and victimizing consequences (Cain/Abel, Lamech, the problem of human violence in the Noah myth) and subvert it by appealing to the non-retribution of God who freely forgives all unconditionally.
In other words, from God’s side, there is not a problem to be solved in terms of wrath or the need for justice as punishment, that is our problem as a species oriented to sacrificial logic. From the perspective of a mimetic theoretical atonement theory (scapegoating) there are only two sides one can take, that of the persecuting mob/majority or that of the victim. Inasmuch as this is the structuring mechanism of human culture and religion, the ‘dei’ (‘it is necessary’ found in the Synoptic Son of Man sayings) indicates that God must reveal God’s character not as part of the persecuting community which requires sacrifice and propitiation but as the One who enters into our human religious sacrificial process of cultural formation as victim, in order to reveal, that whereas we would place God on our side (thus sacred violence), God reveals God’s self to be ‘outside’ our constructs of sacred violence.
The death of Jesus is the place of ‘atonement’, the ‘hilasterion’ and it satisfies our wrath and need for sacrifice, not God’s. By suggesting that we all are persecutors (or that “we all have sinned” 3:23), God can and does have mercy on all.
I am uncertain if this answers your question but I appreciate the conversation. Time to refresh my tea!” -Michael Hardin
He makes some other good observations about the weaknesses of PSA as well. Worth a read, particularly his comments in the comments section.
Edit: Actually, the whole discussion thread is great on this one…