Christ Alone---The Uniqueness of Jesus as Savior: What the Reformers Taught...and Why It Still Matters (The Five Solas Series) by Stephen Wellum & Stephen Wellum

Author:Stephen Wellum & Stephen Wellum [Wellum, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2017-04-18T04:00:00+00:00

Why is this distinction important for the Governmental view? Because it helps explain why Christ’s death is necessary in satisfying rectoral justice but not retributive justice. Since God is the moral governor, it is incumbent upon him to govern the world justly and morally. God’s law is for the good order of society, and that ordering of society is secured only as the moral law is upheld. Contrary to Socinian theology, if God does not satisfy rectoral justice and simply shows mercy by forgiving sinful people, he undermines himself as the governor and does not act in the best interests of the governed.83 Christ’s death, then, is necessary to satisfy rectoral justice; to underscore the terrible nature of sin; and to emphasize that the law must be respected.

How are we forgiven and justified before God? We are forgiven by Christ’s satisfying divine rectoral justice for us and by our availing ourselves of his work by faith and repentance. However, in contrast to penal substitution, Christ did not bear the exact penalty of divine retributive justice for us. Our guilt cannot be transferred to him and furthermore, this was unnecessary because God relaxed the retributive demand of the law. As such, Christ did not have to obey the law fully for me or pay the full penalty of my sin. Instead, Christ offered a suitable equivalent act of atonement which upheld God’s moral governance and revealed the serious nature of human sin. Objectively, Christ’s death upheld the moral governance of the universe while relaxing the demand for my sin to be fully punished. Subjectively, the punishment inflicted on Christ is exemplary in that it reveals God’s hatred of sin and motivates persons to repent of their sins.

Second, to discern how the governmental view functions as a via media, we need to ask the crucial question: How can God relax the requirements of divine retributive justice and still remain just? The answer is this: the governmental view does not view the law as an expression of God’s will and nature; instead, it views the law as an expression of God’s will and thus “outside” of him. Because the law is not grounded in God’s nature, he is free to relax its demand for retributive justice. So, unlike later Reformed theology which contends that God cannot forgive sin without its full payment and satisfaction, the governmental view argues that God is free to will or not will the enactment of justice and the punishment of sin.

By this understanding, the governmental theory argues that Christ’s death is only hypothetically necessary and not absolutely necessary. In penal substitution, since God is the law, if God chooses to save us (which he has graciously chosen to do), he cannot forgive our sins without his righteous demand being fully satisfied. Christ’s death is not merely one of the means God selected to redeem us; it is the only way. Given the God-law-sin relationship, the sacrificial death of Christ as our penal substitute is absolutely necessary for our justification before God.

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