John,

Thank you for your very generous welcome and careful exploration of my admittedly short and provocative post that is heavy on impact and light on explanation.

I am interested in what it means to have your view of God “undermined” by my Atonement Scenario. Does this mean God is diminished, tarnished, blemished, devalued, stained by an Atonement such as the one I’ve described? If so, how so?

My “prooftexting” of Isaiah 45:7 (which you connected to Lamentations 3.38 and Amos 3.6, and to which could also be added Jeremiah 26:3, Jeremiah 36:3, Jeremiah 32:42, Ezekiel 6:10, 1 Samuel 16:23, Micah 1:12, 2 Kings 21:12) was an attempt to show that the Bible does explicitly refer to the evil that God does. These verses do not include the many places that God creates profound calamity, destruction, misery and death throughout the Bible…implicitly the source of evil, or at least a powerful element for it.

As I see it, your ‘panoramic’ view of Scripture where God is righteous, just and loving avoids those blatant instances where God is anything BUT these things.

I am extremely sympathetic to your desire to keep God clean of any wrongdoing, and wish that it were so myself. But I am unable, with good conscience, to do so for at least two reasons:

1. The scriptural references above, of both explicit and implicit descriptions of the injustice and evil that God does and lends power to.

2. The ethical implications arising from the need for an illegal, immoral, unjust death sentence to somehow “set things right” between God and Creation, God and Humanity, Humanity and Creation, Humanity and itself.

As I see it, again, the Cross is God taking responsibility for the evil that Creation contains: NOT because only an innocent sacrifice can rectify such collosal misery; BUT because Justice demands the offender be held accountable.

God is part of the offense, as are we all.