I just finished reading Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason. It was a very interesting book for several reasons. I wish I had read this years ago.
It occurred to me that many of Paine’s arguments against Christianity and the Bible are superficial, fallacious, or easily refuted. Many of his criticisms rely on a few theories that can be countered. Nevertheless, he makes several good points. I think the quote below strikes at the very heart of Christian redemptive theology:
If I owe a person money, and cannot pay him, and he threatens to put me in prison, another person can take the debt upon himself, and pay it for me. But if I have committed a crime, every circumstance of the case is changed. Moral justice cannot take the innocent for the guilty even if the innocent would offer itself. To suppose justice to do this, is to destroy the principle of its existence, which is the thing itself. it is then no longer justice. It is indiscriminate revenge.
I anticipate that most conservative Christians would respond by saying that God (the Bible) defines justice, and to try to construct separate and then see how God (the Bible) measures against that. For those who think that theology has to be reasonable, though, this criticism is a strong one. There is a wide intellectual gap between people who want a reasonable theology and people who assume that whatever they have been taught defines (or at least supersedes) reason axiomatically.
To be honest, I remember reading this quote when I read Paine’s book and thinking about ransoms. Aren’t ransoms instances where justice is abdicated (perhaps temporarily) in favor of salvation (saving people or property)? God paid off the terrorist (Satan I suppose) in order to free the captives (people).
The inherent problem with Christian redemptive theology is that the captives had actually done something wrong. Thus justice is destroyed by exonerating them of their “crimes.”
May I suggest the following:
God remains just in spite of not punishing us because that punishment which we deserved fell upon Jesus.
Hebrews 2:9 supports this, “But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angles, now crowned iwth glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.”
With justice meted out on Jesus, reconciliation could now be meted out to those who follow Jesus. The Father, being just, couldn’t just brush sin under the rug. It had to be dealth with. But to do so would require the death of all mankind (for all have sinned – Romans 3:23). However, verse 24-26 continues, “and [all] are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Him as a sacrifice of atonment, through faith in His blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance He had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished — He did it to demonstrate His justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.”
“But that’s not fair,” we might say. And I’d agree; it wouldn’t be fair — if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. But, because He was resurrected, justice and grace are both accomplished. As He Himself said, “It is finished.”