Ellen,

Excellent questions!  Yes, religious jargon can be confusing.  What concerns you here will be more practically addressed in my reply to Q4: "Why should anyone's salvation depend on embracing an abstract theological system like the Christian Gospel?"  But for now let's just clarify some terms.

In ancient Hebrew practice, offerings and sacrifices can serve as a means of gaining divine support or as tributes to God.   But sacrifices can also serve as a means of expiation (= atonement) and communion with God, and it is in this sense that Christ’s crucifixion can be labelled a "sacrifice.”  
     
The English word “atone” is derived from the phrase “at one.” in the sense of a harmonious personal relationship.   So “atonement” originally meant “at/one/ment” or “reconcilation.  In the more restricted modern usage,  “atonement” refers to the process by which the hindrances to reconciliation with God are removed.  

What paves the way for viewing Christ’s crucifixion as representative rather than substitutionary is the true meaning of the biblical Greek word  “hilasterion.”  In Swedenborg’s day, many Protestants translated this word “propitiation” in the disagreeable sense of the substitutionary appeasement of God’s wrath.   But when used with “sin,” this Greek word means “expiate” (= “atone for”) rather than “propitiate.”  Thus in the Greek Old Testament translation, “hilasterion” commonly translates the Hebrew “kipper” which means “to wipe off, cover over, cleanse.”   What is “wiped off” by Christ’s atonement are the hindrances to reconciliation with God.  

Very astute comments, Craig!

You are bringing up one of the greatest mysteries inherent in the concept of God.   Why would God want to create anything?   How could an omniscient, omnipotent God benefit from anything?  That would seem to imply divine "need" and need would negate God's self-sufficiency.  As already noted, "omniscience" in Hebrew thought means "the ability to know whatever is actually possible."  The limits of what is actually possible--as opposed to logically possible--are unknown.  

This brings me to your question about the benefits of God's assumption of human limitations through Christ's incarnation.  We can speak meaningfully of the redemptive benefits for us.   Beyond this, can we speak of benefits for God?   God is love and love is relational.  So by making it possible for us to achieve union (at--one--ment) with God, God is fulfilling "His" loving nature.   But is there even more to it than that?   Given our ignorance of what is actually possible, might there be a level of intimate experiential knowledge that God can only gain by completely assuming our limitations?   Possibly, but now I'm getting way over my head!

Matt,
When I get to Q4, I'll explain the sense in which Jesus' atoning death embraces people of all faiths and why it precludes the cynical attitude that  "we can sin all we want but not follow his example."  Paul anticipates this attitude with his sarcastic question: "Well then, should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more grace (Romans 6:1)?"

[Matthew:] "The problem with this whole discussion is the notion of God the father being somehow separate and individualized as a superman from man."
__________________

How can you say this?  I've just offered you a model from John Heaney that implies just the opposite.   Jesus draws an analogy between His status as "the Son of God" and the status of every human as "god" (John 10:34-36).  None of Jesus' miracles spring from His unique divine nature.  Jesus needed the anointing of the Holy Spirit at His baptism.   Before that, he performed no recorded miracles.  Why would a man with a full-blown divine nature also need the Holy Spirit to begin His ministry?   As Paul explains, the preincarnate Word "emptied" Himself of all His divine prerogatives to become fully human.  

Don  
 

Don,

You ask how can I say that?  If you read my post, I say that God is not an individualized superman apart from us, and that simplistic characterization is responsible for much confusion about events in the real world.  If we each have a spark of the essence of God in us, and each are to come unto our own understanding of love and life, then we are not separate from the father, in reality.

If an individualized entity, a discrete super-being, allowed a five year old child to be crushed by a school bus, and we were left to wonder why....or meted out each individual's suffering, many of Craig's criticisms would be quite valid.  That is
what I am against - that concept, which I've heard you yourself argue against.


Matthew

Don,

For an enlightened man, you do let your angry side show.  First off, its true you post extensively, but no one says that in order to comment on an issue, one must read a past post first on any thread.  Had I seen it easily, I would have.

I did not dismiss your chanelling posts completely.  Read mine, please where I agreed with you on Juditha's poetry reading - I urged caustion and agreed with you.  I have posted numerous times reports by Robert Bruce and others that entities on the other side might try to say they were who they were not.  However, overall, I think your medium posts were important, but left many with a flavor that most mediums may be channeling evil entities.  Hence, my response.

I do not have a "ghetto" mentality, a phrase you use which I loath.  As you have received positive feedback on your posts here, so have I.  I believe that I present a coherent, well reasoned view and am open minded in my discussions.  One need only look at my interactions with Kyo, and Kathy to see that. 

Don, your scholarly writings are well done and noteworthy.  If you and I have a misunderstanding, that is all it is - it shouldn't be cause for comments about staying or leaving this site, or how skeptical everyone is.

Best to you,

Matthew

Matthew,

Debates spark frank exchanges that need not be caricatured as angry.   Craig and I have had some blunt exchanges.  But their impact on me is a growing respect for his rugged authenticity.   You are responsible for your words: "The problem with this ENTIRE discussion is the notion of god." This language clearly includes me, since I'm leading the discussion.   After rechecking the whole thread, I notice that you post throughout, but never challenge my solution to the problem of unfair pain.  That's fine, but don't sneak in a dismissal unless you are prepared to defend it like Craig.   This site is peppered with skeptics who ridicule sacred writings they have never read or rationally considered.   I spared you my detailed refutation of the Hilarion entity out of respect for Kyo's nonpolemical orientation.

You also duck my point on mediumship.  Of course, you've expressed agreement with me on many points.  But you did prematurely dismiss as bizarre Raphael's conversion story, and in so doing,  you ignore an important experience-based argument for the unique power of Christ.   His name invoked in exorcism has uniquely devastating power which contrasts sharply with Robert Bruce's pathetic Christless battle with his possessing entity.   Channeled entities like Seth, Elias, Ramtha, and the bogus Christ of ACiM have an irrationally venemous reaction to Christ's atoning death, which I have discussed in detail elsewhere.   And mediums who try to abandon their practice in favor of a relationship with Christ mediated through a conventional church can experience  homicidal threats from their spirit guides.   Raphael's chilling experience is one such example; Johanna Miichaelsen's exoerience (which I shall shortly summarize) is another.  In both cases, the mediums fully expected that their spirit guides would approve of their conversion and allow them  to continue their channeling roles.

My adoption of Boris's "ghetto" label is strikingly appropriate for many (not all) posters here.  My use of it has forced some posters to reassess the question of why they confine their reading to in-house New Age propaganda.  As a result, some have broadened their literary horizons.  So my use of the term has served its purpose.

Don

Q3: Doesn’t the Gospel overlook God’s responsibility (= fault) for creating us with our sinful nature?

Craig is entitled to press questions like these: “If our Creator in effect imprisoned us in our sinful for our nature, then is He not in some sense responsible for our frailties?  If Christ is divine and died for our sins, is He not in effect dying for moral failings that He essentially guaranteed?"  Paul directly confronts these questions in Romans:  “God has imprisoned all people in their own disobedience so He could have mercy on everyone (Romans11:32).”  Paul concedes that our Creator has made our sinfulness inevitable and has incorporated this fact into His redemptive plan.   Here God actually does take responsibility for our inevitable shortcomings!  Paul anticipates our next question: “Well then, you might say, `Why does God blame people for not listening?   Haven’t they simply done what He made them do (9:19)?’”  Paul replies that God’s mercy compensates us for our innate weaknesses by offering us all grace through Christ's atoning death (11:32).  

But what if we die as sinful unbelievers?  There is no reason to believe God’s intenton to “have mercy on everyone” (11:32) ends at death.  Paul assures us: “God’s gifts and His call can never be withdrawn (11:29)” and elaborates God's ultimate purpose of universal restoration: “For from Him and through Him and back to Him are all things (11:36).”  It is precisely because God is love and takes responsibility for creating us the way we are that God's love pursues even the hellbound after death *e.g. through retrievals).   For more on this, readers are referred to my replies #1 and #22-25.

By immersing us in a test caldron designed for high-grade soul-shaping, God has created us with frail human natures that are inevitably prone to sin and fail our high ideals.    By any standard, Job experiences as much unfair suffering as most people.   God permits Job and his family to be horribly victimized by various types of natural disaster and human cruelty. So when Job himself is afflicted with painful boils from head to toe, his wife urges him to curse God and die (Job 2:9).  Job’s faithfulness, despite his many ordeals, derives spiritual value precisely because he has every incentive to reject God, and yet, he still remains faithful.   The value of our free will is a function of the strength of our contrary inclinations.  The more intense our trials the greater the moral value of our courage.  The more incentive we have to hate the more noble our unexpected resolve to instead love our enemies.  

Don

Q4: Why should anyone’s salvation depend on embracing an abstract doctrine like the Gospel?

The theological meaning of Christ’s atonement is less important than its practical application for daily living.  The best way to grasp this is to solve the tension between James 2:14-15, 18 and Ephesians 2:8-10.  Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation, dismissed James as “an epistle of straw” for its line of reasoning:  

“What’s the use of saying you have faith if you don’t prove it by your actions?   That kind of faith can't save anyone.  Suppose you see a brother or sister who needs food or clothing, and you say, "Well, good-bye and God bless you; stay warm and eat well’--but then you don’t give that person any food or clothing.  What good does that do?. ..Now someone may argue, `Some people have faith; others have good deeds.’  I say, `I can’t see your faith, but I will show you my faith through my good deeds (James 2:14-15, 18).'”

Luther insists that good works cannot earn salvation and cites texts like Ephesians 2:8-10 to support this claim:

‘You are saved by grace through faith.  So you can’t take any credit for this.  It is a gift from God.  Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done; so none of us can boast about it.  We are God’s masterpiece.”

Craig muses: “I’m not sure how this (Ephesians 2:8-10) states we cannot earn brownie points with God."  Luther would reply that “grace” means "unmerited favor.” and does not depend on good works. But Luther overlooks 2 key points: (1) In both Hebrew and Greek, “faith” means "faithfulness", not “mental assent to a body of doctrine.”   Faithfulness means obedience to God’s principles and therefore involves good works.   (2) The words of Jesus’ brother James cannot be so easily dismissed.  Luther is right that the Gospel excludes any attempt to earn salvation through good works.  What he overlooks is that works are essential for another reason.  

Christ’s atoning death expresses the grace of God.  Since grace is unmerited favor, the only meaningful response to grace is a life motivated by gratitude, a life that constantly expresses gratitude (e.g. 1 Thess 5:18; Phil 4:5). Good works are the only way I can make my gratitude real for God’s grace.   A grace-based life is based on 4 principles.    

(1) I must love you out of a sense of privilege rather than a sense of duty.  Jesus considered it a privilege to redeem me; so I must consider it a privilege to love and serve you.  Duty can imply a burden and a sense of reluctance, or an implicit demand that you return my kindness or at least express appreciation for it.  A grace-based life considers it a joy and a privilege to serve you to make my gratitude real to God.  

(2) Christ’s atoning death means I cannot collect applause in my mind for my meritless good deeds or for putting up with others.  The cross expresses God’s willingness to accept me just the way I am if I in turn accept others just the way they are.  This has these staggering implications:

“But if you’re willing to listen, I say, love your enemies.  Do good to those who hate you.  Pray for the happiness of those who curse you.  Pray for those who hurt you (Luke 6:27-28).”
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“We bless those who curse us.  We are patient with those who abuse us.   We respond gently when evil things are said about us.  Yet we are treated like the world’s garbage, like everybody’s trash--right up to the present moment (1 Corinthians 4:12-13).”

(3) I must not compare my spirituality favorably with the spirituality of others (Matthew 20:1-15). If I do, I am unwittingly relapsing into a “brownie point” scheme and am perverting the Gospel of grace.  A true story from the life of Frederick II, an 18th century King of Prussia, nicely illustrates this.

Frederick once visited a Berlin prison.   One by one the inmates tried to convince him that they didn’t deserve to be locked up with these other guys.  To hear them tell it, they were all unjustly accused of crimes they never committed--all except one man who sat quietly in the corner while all the rest unfolded their long and complicated stories.  Curious, Frederick approached the man in the corner and asked him why he was in jail.  “Armed robbery, your honor.”  “Are you  guilty?”  “Yes sir, I’m afraid I deserve my sentence.”  Frederick sighed and then issued this order to the guard: “Release this guilty man.  I don’t want him corrupting all these innocent people!”  Frederick's merciful wit echoes Jesus' sarcastic reply to Pharisaic disgust over the company He keeps:

"When some...Pharisees saw Jesus eating with people like that [i. e. tax collectors and notorious sinners), they said to His disciples: `Why  does He eat with such scum?'  When Jesus heard this, He told them: `Healthy people don't need a doctor.   I have come not to call the righteous [= sarcasm like Frederick's] , but sinners (Mark 2:16-17).'"

I must view myself as a constant work-in-progress and focus on the areas where I need to grow. I must view others through the lens of their magnificent potential by God’s grace.   How do I know I’m doing  both these things right?  Paul succinctly expresses the feeling: “Be humble.  esteeming others more than yourself (Philippians 2:3).”  

(4)  The atonement means I am not judged by the totality of my life in the sense of an accumulation of merit (= brownie points).  That orientation only leads to smug self-righteousness.   Instead, God's grace and forgiveness are focussed on my future, on the magnificent person I might yet become by God’s grace.  Consider the early lives of our greatest saints.
   
Abraham sends his wife and son off to starve in the desert and endangers his own wife by lying about her to save himself.  Yet Abraham is later called “the friend of God (Isaiah 41:8).”  Moses repeatedly loses his temper at the people he is supposed to be leading; but Moses is granted an intimacy with God that no other prophet experiences.   David commits adultery with Bathsheba and covers this up by having her husband murdered.   Yet David is later described as “a man after God’s own heart (1 Samuel 13:14).”  St. Psul was a hitman for the Pharisees who jailed, beat, and murdered Christians.   Yet he becomes Christ’s most effective apostle.  As a young man, St. Augustine is pronounced incorrigible by his teachers.  He becomes a cultist and a womanizer who fathers a child out of wedlock.  Yet he later writes the first spiritual autobiography in history and blesses millions by doing so.   John Newton is a brutal slave trader whose early life is full of debauchery.   Yet he experiences Christ’s grace at sea in a life-threatening storm and, in response, later writes the most beloved hymn  “Amazing Grace.”  He then teams up with William Wilberforce to abolish slavery in the British Empire a century before our Civil War.

Christ’s atonement means God buries my sins in the sea of His forgetfulness and puts up a sign that says, “No Fishing!”  So when I wallow in guilt, I am insulting God’s grace by fishing in a No Fishing zone.  Luther insightfully reduces this truth to two poignant words: “Sin boldly!”   What he means is this: I’m going to sin anyway; so I have two choices.  I can immerse myself in self-flagellation and guilt feelings or I can sin with gusto.  Not that I sin deliberately, but I know that as long as I long to grow in grace, God will erase all memory of my sins and give me a clean slate and a fresh start.   So I sin cheerfully, knowing that my missteps are but a small step backwards in the upward journey towards blissful union with God.        

Don

Matthew,

Good question!  Luther's motto, ‘Sin boldly!” applies only to the spiritually mature and so presumes that we acknowledge and learn from our mistakes.   The mature conscience is tuned into God’s moral law and produces guilt and pain when we violate that law (Romans 2:14-15).  People with this type of conscience no longer need moral teaching (1 John 2:27) and safely live a live free of obsession with complex moral guidances.  Augustine expresses this liberating attitude in his motto: "Love God and do what you please"---terrible advice for the morally underdeveloped!      Luther’s slogan, “Sin boldly!”,  reflects Paul's stress on the need for joyful living as opposed to a guilt-ridden or fear-based life.  For Paul, joyful lving requires a disciplined thought life: "Fix your  thoughts on what is pure and honorable and right.  Think about things that are pure and lovely and admirable.  Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise (Philippians 8-9).”  

Luther’s motto does not apply to people with an underdeveloped conscience.  Paul warns that an immature conscience can be warped by peer pressure (1 Corinthians 8:10), force of habit, or a lack of spiritual knowledge (8:7).  Relationships with such people must not be guided by the principle, “Let your conscience be your guide.”  Instead, let the conscience of those with a less enlightened spirituality be our guide (1 Corinthians 10:25-29) and let them grow at their own pace.  Premature moral pressure might cause them to develop a resistance to the pangs of their own underdeveloped conscience.  Conscience gets its signals from the heart, which can be dulled, hardened, or calloused (1 Timothy 4:2).   We must not defile the conscience of the “weak” (1 Corinthians 8:7).  So we need to back off, empathize, and use a low-key approach that respects Paul’s principle: :”Let each one be fully persuaded in his own mind (Romans 14:5b).”  The corruption of the capacity of the “spiritual newbie’s” remorse for sin is a worse calamity than his currently inadequate rational capacity to discern right from wrong (1 Timothy 4:2; Titus 1:15).  We must recognize that God evaluates us according to how well we live up to the limited spiritual illumination we have received  (Luke 12:47-48) and does not impute sin when there is no enlightened moral perception (Romans 5:13).  

Don