Dan,
Having skimmed through this, I think you got some good answers. I wouldn’t say anything differently, so I won’t chime in on the things you asked me. I see now where you’re coming from – It didn’t occur to me that you accepted penal substitution but not eternal conscious torment. More often than not, the two go together, but there are those who hold PS and are also universalists. They do tend to come to the conclusion you are reaching for – that there is in fact no wrath to come as it has all been satisfied. Logically this didn’t work for me. The reason is Romans.
The gospel, to my understanding, is this: Jesus came to set us free from the law of sin and death. All have sinned, and the “wage” sin pays is death. We can’t help sinning; we were born to it. But that doesn’t mean that sin doesn’t lead to death. What’s more, the whole world, even those who haven’t sinned in the way Adam did, is also bound into slavery to sin and death. Paul explained how he, who wanted to do the good, found evil always ready to hand so that the good he wanted to do, he didn’t do; the evil he hated, that he did. So he found a law at work within himself and he called it “the law of sin and death.” Who would free him from this body of death? This body that wanted to sin while his spirit, weak and helpless, could not master the flesh. “I think my God,” he says, “through my Lord Jesus Christ. For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death.”
You see, the problem is not sins we have committed. We have long history of God forgiving sins without any atonement made. There is no sacrifice given for sins in the Jewish law code whereby INTENTIONAL sins can be forgiven. There are provisions for unknowing sins, but intentional sin isn’t even addressed. Yet God again and again forgives His sinning people. Eventually He sends them off to Babylon for a “time-out” to think about what they’ve done, but He restores them after their exile. He forgives and forgives and forgives. His mercies never come to an end. You might say that He forgives with an eye toward the future death of Christ, or that Christ is the Lamb slain from the foundations of the world, and that is a point. However, scripture doesn’t really say this. There’s one bit early on in 1 Corinthians I believe, that might point to this, but it’s a somewhat foggy statement and can be taken several ways. You’d think there would be a clearer attestation or at least a clearer hint or inference that God needs sacrifice in order to forgive sin.
Oh yes – there’s another verse: Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin. Some translations say forgiveness, but remission really is a more accurate rendering. If you do render it ‘remission,’ that puts the verse in a whole different light. Remission means healing. It means recovery. Remission is when something retreats, goes back, undoes itself. Allen has pointed out to me, and I believe he’s right, that the “shedding of blood” can be a metaphor for the difficulty of the operation.
There’s also another way to think about this and I don’t know how accurate it would be (some of the others can critique this, along with you). The life is in the blood, according to the OT law. It is only by Jesus giving us His life and us leaving behind the old life to take on the new (His) life, that we can be freed from sin. This is consistent with Paul’s argument in Romans. Jesus made a way for us to die to the flesh so that our bondage to sin (he uses the metaphor of a woman whose husband dies being free to marry another as she has been set free from the law of her husband) can come to an end. In our case it is we who die rather than the ‘husband.’ Though He has also condemned sin in the flesh – so the death can be seen as affecting either the law of sin and death or the slave of sin who is, of God, in Christ Jesus on the cross.
Those are the only two verses I can think of which might be seen to say that God needs a sacrifice in order to forgive sin. Other places, He just forgives it. And why shouldn’t He? He’s God. It’s not evil for Him to forgive sin; He’s the one who forgives sins. The priests and Pharisees who watched Jesus heal the paralytic protested, “Only God can forgive sin!”
And where’s the forgiveness anyway, if Jesus paid for it? If you knew I was having financial trouble and you went to the electric company out of mercy for me and paid my bill, would the EC be correct in saying it had forgiven the debt? This works for God, too. If Jesus paid, God has not forgiven. He’s been paid what He (we say) demanded. The electric company would be within its rights to forgive my debt; it’s their money and they can forgive the debt if they want to. God can forgive sin if He wants to.
The problem we have with this is that we see this as unjust. We want the sinner to pay, to understand what the sin has done to others and to experience that so that he’ll be sorry for what he’s done. But this is only our limited conception of justice. If a mugger killed your brother because he couldn’t get his wallet out fast enough, you would want the mugger brought to justice (whatever that means to you). But the justice humans mete out is so very limited. All we can do is to try to take away any advantage the mugger might have gained over the man he killed. We will put him in prison or put him to death, but what we will NEVER be able to do is to administer true justice. The mugger must make restitution. He must give back the life he has taken, and he must restore what he stole (not just the money) seven-fold. (I think that’s the rate – it may be different.)
Obviously neither the mugger nor anyone else can restore what was taken. Ideally, your brother would be restored to you and the mugger would be taught (by chastening if appropriate) what it felt like to be mugged and murdered and what it felt like to the family members who lost someone precious to them – the purpose of the teaching being to heal him from his sinfulness. His SIN can be forgiven unilaterally by God because God is able to forgive it and to undo the consequences to others. Then when all has been restored, the healed sinner can be restored to you and your brother as a fellow brother in the household of YHWH – a loving sibling as he should be.
THAT is truly justice – not that the man is paid out. You’re right. Any payment required to anyone has been paid by Jesus (and I don’t believe the payment was made to the Father – to us, maybe). It’s the restoration of all concerned that was Jesus’ chief accomplishment. For this purpose was the Son of God manifest; to destroy the works of the evil one. Note – not to propitiate the just wrath of an angry god; to DESTROY the works of the evil one.
I think this may be one of the longest posts I’ve written here. If you can’t bring yourself to examine the other theories of atonement that the church, historically, HAS accepted and that we to this day celebrate in music and poetry and prose, and that are more abundantly attested to in scripture than PS, that’s not the end of everything. I confess I don’t understand the logic of clinging to PS when once you’ve let go ECT, and when scripture presents us with so many varied pictures of the atonement – but it’s not the end of everything. You are right. Given PS, given that God is not allowed to forgive sins just because He decides to, given that He took satisfaction from His Son rather than from us, there would no be no reason for anyone to suffer in the wrath of God. To me, though, it is our bondage to sin that is the problem, so much more than the sins themselves.
Blessings, Cindy
but Cindy is a complete gentlewoman.
Especially, don’t say you agree with Clarke! 
), but I don’t want to confuse it with Roman Catholicism or Eastern Catholicism/Orthodoxy (since those are much more detailed particular branches of the church and neither one officially advocates universalism. Although they respected it for several centuries and seem to be coming back around that way now.)