Thanks ericboehmer for your insights. Your first point makes sense to me - I think this is the sort of thing andrew was talking about earlier when he advocated reading the atonement in it’s historical context.

Your second point confuses me a bit.

As I see it - the key question regarding justice: Is the goal of justice a pair of balanced scales or lasting freedom for the oppressed?

My feeling is that much justice-talk is about the former when it should really be about the latter.

I feel very uncomfortable with the idea that Jesus’ death is an act of justice in the ‘satisfying’ sense. The penal substitutionary atonement theory given to me held that God punishes sin because of his perfect justice. Thus the sinless Jesus’ receipt of that punishment evidences absorption of it and a freedom from it for those ‘in Christ’.

Why, however, does God’s perfect justice move him to punish? Does he want to balance the scales? If so, why is Jesus telling people to move beyond ‘an eye for an eye’? I’m not talking about simply feeling love and forgiveness. I’m talking about actually loving your enemies. It doesn’t make sense to me to say that Jesus - God incarnate - is trying to get those around him to see the potential for good in even the worst of sinners, but that his Father in heaven is stoking the fires for a bit of penal correctitude.

I understand God’s burning justice to be his fighting the corner of those oppressed by evil, not some abstract accounting calculation or a topping up of the yin to balance the yang. If the atonement is about justice, it’s Jesus’ identification with the crushed and his resurrection to better life that does it for me. God is actually doing something to combat death and decay.

I cannot conceive of a God who ‘waves his hands and closes his eyes’. But as I see it, justice is about making things better for the victims of evil in its many guises - good news to the poor, freedom for the captives, sight to the blind, etc. - not making things any worse than they already are.