I suppose I would be classified as a Christian evangelical. But I’m probably overly influenced by people like C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald, who don’t fit into the prevailing American evangelical tradition on the issue of atonement. I can’t easily think of anyone who clearly articulates my own views. And I tend to think the way people over-codify certain types of philosophical or theological arguments actually ends up obscuring the truth rather than revealing it, because we stop remembering that all theological language is primarily analogical and metaphorical. It’s a means of grasping and explaining realities beyond singular human experience (much like a lot of high level theoretical physics, we can only see it or explain it by means of something at our level of middle reality, not directly as it is.

I believe I got that idea from Dorothy L Sayers (it’s been a long time, I can’t be sure). And also, when we over-codify and intellectualize, we invert the intended nature of the facts of theology, as well as their communicative purpose. Basically, the point of Jesus’ death on the cross wasn’t to create a theory of atonement. And it wasn’t done to create or solve puzzles for overly analytical theologians. It was meant to bring life and freedom. It was meant to communicate that in a very basic way to ordinary people, to speak to something they could recognize in themselves (that life on a fundamental level is suffering and injustice, that we all share and must take responsibility for our role in that suffering, that the evil of humanity is our own evil, that our failure to commit ourselves and our lives and our treatment of others to the highest good we can conceive of; God/righteousness/health of the soul; results in terrible degeneration and suffering for us and for others, ending in death and dissolution, simply as a natural consequence; to sum it up, guilt, imperfection, unhealth, i.e. sinfulness, and that the burden of that sin is a fact, not a theory, and its weight hangs on our whole species and individually like a millstone).

The fact of that burden, that knowledge, that problem, is responded to first by means of the law, which illustrates well a path for crossing some of that distance by increasing our understanding of the good and the health of the soul and how much we harm ourselves and others and tries to put limits on that destruction and guide us into a better path. But the law also only serves to illustrate how trapped we are, how far separated from what we know and wish we were, how completely unable we are to follow that path for anything more than a moment without falling off it into some unhealthy and oppressive extreme. Then the atonement comes along, not a new argument, not a new way of understanding the problem, but a new fact. A factual response to a factual problem.

Basically, the problem of human sin is not the sort of problem one can solve simply by coming up with a new way of understanding it. I say “simply” because, yes, how you understand something makes an enormous difference to how a problem affects you, and also to how you try to affect it. So I’m not against analysis in the least, I’m just against reductive analysis that mistakes the discussion about the content for the content itself. The atonement itself is the engine that drive the car and gets us places, not the map or schematic of the car we draw after being impressed by its performance. Their goal is to help us understand and appreciate the thing that truly moves us, not be mistaken for the substance of it.

I think C.S. Lewis had something like this to say. That all theories about the atonement were far less significant than the fact of it. I’ve sort of generalized that approach to my opinion about a lot of things in the Bible. The point of the creation stories isn’t the details, and the Bible itself is fairly unconcerned with giving them in a way that pleases us and checks all the boxes. It really only cares about the fact of it, that the universe is a place of intention and order and meaning, with a definite beginning and haunted with purpose, and we are the culmination of that creation because we are the one thing also able to perceive purpose and meaning, and to create purposes and meanings of our own, like little gods (we are made in his image).

Perhaps I’m wrong in taking this attitude, but I’m not too fussed about some of the technical details of mechanisms, partly because getting too fussed about such things distracts you from the truly significant aspects of the fact of creation (its actual meaning), partly because it creates a veil of confusion, convincing us we’re observing in pedestrian notebook detail things that in reality are beyond our human understanding, description, or experience. These things are mysteries, not because they’re irrational, but because they’re part of the facts of life and humanity and experience, they define our existence and how we live and think within it. And they’re so fundamental and transcendent to the world we inhabit that we can’t properly see how they work or why they are, and we can only understand them by analogy and metaphor and embodiment.

Jesus himself is essentially one of those mysteries come to knock about in our neck of reality. He’s a living metaphor, an incarnation, a thing in our world of middle reality that allows us to grasp and touch and understand and deal with the transcendent realities that define our existence but are fundamentally beyond our experience and understanding. We literally, by him, bridge the gap between us and the transcendent unknowables (which aren’t entirely unknowable but are unknowable to us as they are in themselves, we can only know them by proxy, by other means and their effect on things, much as we only see objects by the light that is changed by encountering them, or more accurately as we only observe minute, fundamental particles that are beyond the reach of our senses secondhand by their interaction with things we can perceive).

We can’t grasp those mysteries clearly because they’re beyond our level of reality, but they define it, they rule it. We don’t understand how these things beyond our reality touch us and define us (we don’t really have any clue how mind and its objects and material realities intersect, or why nonmatieral realities like math, information, the laws of physics, concepts, the laws of logic, etc shape and define the behavior and expression of physical reality), but they do. Anyway, the Bible is trying to communicate to people at the level where they actually live and exist, in embodied terms that present to them those realities which they cannot directly grasp in themselves, and they’re trying to fix things about us that are defined at a transcendent level but are the experienced daily at a personal, embodied level.

You don’t have to be a theologian (not that it isn’t good for everyone to be a little bit of one) to grasp and recognize and accept and live out the truths and realities of the Bible. Because those higher realities were made manifest in things, in facts, in the stories and lives of people, particularly Jesus, they’re available to all men and women; they can be grasped at the level at which we live. Transcendent realities exist, we are aware of them, but we experience them through the things we experience and the lives we lead.

So if you’re going to try to speak into the lives of humans, all humans, regardless of time and language and culture and circumstances, to make them understand those realities, and particularly if you want to respond to their experience and knowledge with some new knowledge that’s meant to help and raise them up and heal them, then your best bet is to do so through their own incarnation, through the lives and perspectives of humans. The whole Bible is an example of this, and Jesus is a special case, an avatar of the actual transcendent itself, not in part but in whole, but presented as a part, where we can encounter it and have our realities remade by it.

Of course there are many other ways of thinking about the atonement, and my position isn’t so much a position as a commentary on positions in general. I like their content, they have a lot to offer, I’m not saying they’re wrong, but I’m critical of their approach, the method. Of course, technical details do matter, definitions matter, because definitions are like premises, they define how and whether your argument works. And a good theological explication can reveal details and truths and means of application that might have been previously missed because of the limits of a particular person or tradition or culture or language. But an approach that turns great truths and mysteries into mere technical documents and puzzles, that makes us think we grasp and criticize and manipulate their parts to our own particular taste and pleasure and satisfaction, an approach that produces merely technical theories, gems for experts to fashion and appraise and keep in their vaults, instead of giving love and life and transformation to all, is a misguided approach.

I think J I Packer did a decent analysis of this subject. I’m not saying it agrees with mine, only that his approach is reflective of my own experience. He isn’t so concerned with arguing details and definitions as correcting the whole approach. Here’s a link to it. It’s very thoughtful, but it’s long.

I think William Lane Craig, who I have some books by, does a very good job defending the more traditional evangelical view. He’s very much all about being systematic and rational and textual. I appreciate someone who gives a really good account of something, because even if you don’t agree entirely, it helps you see the good points of that point of view and what it means and how it is contributing to the discussion. There will often be certain very strong, even undeniable truths in any good argument that are providing it with its power, and if you can manage to isolate and extract them they can help guide your search and can be integrated with other information and theories to build a more cohesive whole (as well as to help recognize and guard against theories that are making opposing mistakes). But I haven’t bothered to look up links to any specific articles by him on this.

Of course there are other ways of dealing with the atonement, lots of ways of understanding it. There are psychological theories that abstract it as archetypal and preserve its meaning as necessary, even if it wasn’t actually factual in a technical sense. I’m not sure what I think about those theories. I like them; you could be a believer or non-believer and hold them, although you would basically be being a non-believer who had consented to the necessity of acting, for all intents and purposes, as a believer. That’s sort of arguing that belief (or maybe more accurately, faith) is philosophically and psychologically necessary, but not factually necessary. Which, if it’s true, is an odd thing, but maybe it’s just part and parcel of the weird way the world (and humanity) works. Or maybe those things are philosophically and psychologically necessary because they really are true on all levels. Who knows?

And of course different cultures (including our own current one) have produced many different theories about the meaning of the death of Jesus, drawing on how they understand the world and the moral and intellectual judgements they take for granted as given, and the dimensions of meaning they see as most real or important.

One possible alternative to the penal substitution theory of atonement that doesn’t always get considered by theologians but is often considered by ordinary people, is to attack the premises directly upon which its meaning is built, rendering it into incoherence. That does solve the problem, on a practical level, and often that’s what people want.

For example, you could deny the burden of sin or the existence of a transcendent conception of good (of God). This solves the problem of guilt and our own sinfulness by asserting that sin, or any real source of righteousness, does not actually exist. This is a kind of theory of atonement, because it does wipe away the weight of sin and solves the problem of guilt. It does free us. But it buys that freedom at the cost of nihilism.

It’s a bit like freeing yourself from the burden of doctors by denying the existence of illness. The only problem is, if you sacrifice illness you also sacrifice health. The concept of health no longer has meaning; its an empty concept. When Dostoyevsky and Sarte observed “If there is no God, all things are permitted”, they weren’t making a theological statement so much as recognizing a necessary philosophical truth. If there is no definition of the good, of health, then there cannot be a definition of the bad, of sickness. If there is no intention, no transcendent purpose or meaning, to a thing, if it’s just the bare matter and however it happens to be arranged, then all judgements about it are fundamentally arbitrary and incoherent, for they reference a concept for definition that does not exist.

So you get out of sin and guilt, but only by denying that there’s any real idea of health or purpose or goodness apart from personal, arbitrary, fundamentally non-rational prejudices. If there is no such thing as a hammer and what it was made for, what its meaning and intention and proper function are, then there’s no reality to justify any judgements or statements about whether a particular object is a good or bad hammer. You’re not actually saying anything with content, at most you’re just making complex grunts of personal pique. All such objects are equally valid hammers, because they are also all equally invalid, because the concept doesn’t actually mean anything or exist in any objective sense.

And that’s the fundamental premise of nihilism and moral relativism, that there ain’t no such beast. I’m not saying there aren’t good reasons to believe that’s the right answer, it’s actually perfectly coherent as a theory. It is a legitimate answer. A lot of people just may not really be prepared to swallow all the consequences. And there are a lot of them.

If all paths are equal, if all directions lead to the same destination, then you have no particular reason to move in any of them. And there is no way to judge your progress down any of them. You’re as much at their destination at one point as you were when you started, and as far along as any other person is on their path, because there are no external reference points for comparison. Good is whatever you happen to judge (if that word even makes sense; “belch” makes just as much sense) it to be at that moment. Words like “better” are reducible to mere emotional statements, they’re just expressions of individual mental states, they don’t reference anything outside the mood of the person who utters them at the moment. All paths are equally good because they’re all equally wrong, in the sense that there is no meaning to either word.

Unfortunately, most people don’t seem to be able to live coherently in this sort of nihilistic vacuum where all reality and value is merely personal prejudice and emotional instincts and reactions. Most people, contrary to Bertrand Russell, find themselves unable to build their lives on a foundation of unyielding despair and meaninglessness. In that kind of world, by necessity, any conflict between competing interests can only be prevented by avoidance (I’ll keep away from you and you keep away from me), and failing that, can only be further resolved by conflict, by one overcoming the other through force.

In such a zero-sum, non-objective world of competing gods, what other options are there? All speech is merely assertion of arbitrary power. Because there’s no outside arbitrating ground to appeal to or even interact on, no actual common ground on which competing claims can be tested against one another to resolve anything, only force and assertion of identity can resolve conflicts. Our moral judgments exist only in our identity, so they can only be resolved through a conflict of identity, mine overcoming yours or yours overcoming mine. There may be happy accidents where our prejudices overlap, but in cases of genuine conflict of interest there isn’t any other recourse, only my ability to compel my value prejudices to prevail over yours matters.

So the problem of sin gets resolved in this kind of world, we can be free from guilt, from sin, from needing a doctor, from the law. There is no need for judgment, for justice, for punishment (externally applied or internally earned as a natural consequence), no God nor law to be appeased or consequences to be avoided, but we buy it at the cost of all meaning, progress, and the ties that unite us in common humanity. The Greeks, rather than taking a skeptical view, on observing the vast proliferation of moral ideas in all cultures, took a rather more measured approach, reasoning that morality must be fundamental and inescapable for all mankind, and invented philosophy to discuss and arbitrate and help decide between the various claims and viewpoints advanced.

This is a bit like the different reactions people could have to the elephant analogy, where three people feel an elephant and speculate about its identity. A skeptical response takes all the various differing answers and concludes that there is no reality, only perspective (identity). A more considered approach might determine that there must be something there, something big and solid, if absolutely everyone brought before it can feel something, and that that thing is very big, bigger than us or any single perspective’s ability to grasp fully, necessitating a work of collaboration on shared grounds to add it all up and build the best picture possible.

Having said all that, I don’t think you can really disprove the skeptical theory on purely rational grounds; you can only lay out the costs, benefits, and consequences and see how people choose to respond. You can’t force anyone into meaning and purpose (and their attendant consequences). Heaven can’t be made compulsory. Forced righteousness is no righteousness at all. It has to be chosen. It’s a heavy burden to accept, it brings with us an awareness of our own faults, failings, disease, shame, guilt; everything we have done wrong and everything we are that’s wrong. But for that price we get meaning, a goal, a purpose, the possibility of progress, of growth, of help, of health.

So, on balance, considering life is already to a large degree composed of inescapable suffering, believing in a means to objectively remedy it will seem better to many than resigning ourselves to it and sinking below the world of thinking things with purpose and intention to mere artifices of instinct and passion and prejudice. I guess it depends on how you answer the question of whether you would rather be a pig satisfied or Socrates dissatisfied. Both are ultimately due for the slaughter. Whether you think it makes any difference to be one or the other in the meantime is up to you.

So, I don’t like to actually give any specific thoughts on the technical details of the theory of atonement itself, I prefer to figure that out in my own head and engage in meta-criticism. But if I had to advance any small idea that I’ve tested and developed over time related to it, it would be the theory that the judgements and punishments of God, unlike the judgements of humans, are not substitutionary but are necessary. They’re tautological, they’re definitional. Their necessity is inherent to and implied in and derived from the very definitions of the concepts, or rather the very nature of the things themselves on their deepest level. In that sense, they’re perfect, unlike the imperfect judgements and punishments of men and women. The punishments fit the crime because they are the crime, the crime is the movement away from order/purpose/beauty/health/truth into a state of chaos/failure of purpose/distortion/disease/dishonesty, and the ultimate punishment is just being that and being separated from all those things we wish to be united to and aspire to as goodness, separation from God. Any further consequences are merely the natural outgrowth of that separation.

To unpack what I mean, the deliberate judgments of humans against one another are fundamentally substitutionary. Evil and harm exist within the human soul and the human experience. If you point to any specific physical fact, outside the meaning of those facts to people or the world in general, then there is no place where you can find evil. Evil resides in the world of judgment, of the process of determine the meaning of a fact to something else. A rock suffers no evil in being broken because the breaking has no meaning to it. A purely materialistic and mechanistic world, a world of only rocks, contains no evil.

So evil, if it exists, exists in us. In our minds and souls. That’s where it’s located. This tracks with statements from great thinkers and saints and martyrs of all faiths, who like Socrates at his trial claimed that there was no true evil that could be forcibly done to a good man or woman, no suffering that could destroy them, because their wellbeing was located in the condition of their soul, not their body, and on the whole they would rather lose one than the other. I’m not saying thats the whole truth of things, only that it illustrates something unique and amazing about people and the nature of good and evil.

So, because we recognize something good, health of the soul, health of a growing, expanding, balanced human, aimed toward the highest good in themselves and in others, then we also recognize the acts and habits that contradict that health and that trajectory. So we take action to prevent that result. Parents make rules, states make laws. The laws of states tend to be more limited, but have similar goals. We educate, we penalize certain behaviors, we set up structures to reward others, because we know what states they will result in.

As parents, we often can’t explain adequately to a child why they need to learn not to lie or overindulge or cheat or use violence to get what they want. Ultimately, it’s because we know the pain that would result from the person they would become, how unhealthy a thing they would grow into. They can’t grasp that; we can’t give them the experience by time travel of the pain they would feel and cause in others. In fact we don’t even have perfect access to the pain we’re causing others, because we’re locked in our own hewds and experiences. so we give them something as a substitute, something within their own experience. A punishment. A time out or other penalty, some kind of small, controllable pain matched to their level of understanding and the seriousness of the act, by which they can grasp the gravity of their act and learn and be motivated to avoid its ultimate outcome.

Every punishment we give as parents is some sort of substitution, a sort of vaccine. It hurts, it’s unpleasant, but it’s just a shadow of the consequences of the real disease, and innoculates us against it. The punishments of the state are of a similar nature, but less personal. But the state is still standing in the parental role, we’ve simply reduced the expansive personal guidance of a parent for a more minimal, limited guidance that we’ve been able to agree applies to everyone. Of course, our judgements are never perfect, because our knowledge of the person and of the impact of what they’re doing and it’s consequences and how best to fix it is limited. And we’re not perfectly good ourselves. We’re doing our best with what we have.

Laws, and the rules of parents, exist to prevent evil, to prevent us from doing and becoming evil, the living out of the consequences of chaos, disease, maltreatment, dissolution, and misuse. Pain is the sensory and emotional signal that those things exist in us and in others. Even the death penalty is substitutionary. We make you die to experience the death you have caused. We can’t transplant you into the minds of those you’ve harmed or slain, but we can give you your own death and demonstrate for others how the consequence of becoming that thing is the proliferation of death (and it also shows it to you, and also enforces on you the same cessation of life and freedom that you forced on others, depending on what your theory on the death penalty it).

That’s an extreme example, most others are more obvious. We cannot make you live from within them the losses of your victims, the consequences of your acts, but we can return them to you in your own life experience, with some hope that you will be rehabilitated, realize what harm you have done, what you have become, gain insight into the chaos you spread into the lives of others, and so seek to change your course. And if not, we can perpetually deny you your agency, we can perpetually delay and prevent you from living out that future state and consequence. Which, as a stopgap, is the least good outcome, because it simply denies all moral agency. The hope, and the whole idea behind the ideal “let the punishment fit the crime” is to give a punishment that stands in for the crime in your own life that lets you understand it and learn from it and avoid it in the future, to help you grow and so not need it again.

That’s why we parents say things like “here’s a reminder” and “I’m going to teach you a lesson”. However poorly we may be enacting it, however misguided or ineffective we may be in our approach, that is what we’re trying to do. We know where something will lead, or has led, and we want to make those consequences understandable to the person in question so they won’t realify that situation (or realify it again). So we give them a punishment to represent that undesirable state to them, so they will seek to avoid it in future. If we’re good parents and care for our children and desire life for them and others, if the state is good and desires life and growth and happiness for its citizens, they make rules to protect them, to guide them toward health and away from destruction and chaos and disease, often by threatening something else as a punishment.

But divine justice is different.

The wages of sin being death isn’t a pronouncement; its an observation of a necessary identity contained within the concepts. Growth toward the highest conception of goodness, beauty, and truth in a person (becoming more like God, the embodiment of the good, the true, and beautiful) is life. Life in its truest essence IS order and purpose and intention and moving toward those purposes. Growing away from them is death, descent into chaos, disorder, disease, dysfunction (of body, self, relationships, and everything you manage), loss of purpose and meaning and health.

And this is what I mean by saying that the judgements of God are necessary rather than substitutionary. It’s not a choice or a lesson, it’s the inevitable consequence of what is meant by doing good and doing evil. God literally is the embodiment of cosmic justice; he is the embodiment of the concept of the good, true, and beautiful, of what it means to be what you were made to be and made to do and become in all your various capacities. In time, such acts reach a natural fulfillment of their own accord, as a seed produces a flower of its own kind.

A parent may punish a child with a timeout for lying, as a substitute act. But God, the nature of truth itself, delivers punishment within the natural course of the act itself, in what it does to us and to the world around us, the flowering of its own nature. A bad deed is its own reward, because you and your life become the thing that it makes of you and your world. If there weren’t a natural, necessary, ultimately unavoidable consequence to a sin, then it wouldn’t be a sin. If diseases never had any symptoms or effects, they wouldn’t be diseases. Depending on what the case is, the consequence may be a loss of growth and order and beauty and meaning in your life (such as infidelity might cause), or it might be a loss of capacity, a loss of potential beauty and growth and order and meaning (such as a failure to mature enough to create meaningful relationships might cause).

In either case, you either will lose or won’t fulfill the greatest realization of the purpose for that part of you that God intended (or that pursuing the highest truth, good, and beauty in this area could have yielded. The hammer might not be broken entirely, but it won’t be working the way it could have, the way its deepest purpose and design, which are the nature of meaning, intended. None of that happens by external force when it comes God’s justice; it all happens by the necessity of the nature of what the concepts mean. God means the highest conceivable ideal of truth, beauty, goodness, meaning, and purpose. Sin sman’s anything that is a movement away from that toward chaos, disfunction, loss of growth and potential, untruth, dissolution, and ugliness. You can’t have an ideal without it becoming a judge, and things aren’t better or worse except insofar as they lead inevitably to that state of being. Not arbitrarily, so that morality is merely mercenary, but by definition.

So whatever theory of atonement you come up with, the burden of sin and guilt is one of the truths of our existence; it’s a fact. And the divine justice of God is a necessary consequence of the meaning of the terms God and sin. It’s not a matter of volition, it’s a necessary identity statement (which is a well established logical concept). God must be just because that concept is contained in the definition of what “God” means. Sin must drive you away from him because that concept is contained in the meaning of what “sin” is.

Having said that, it follows that whatever price must be paid for sin, no one will pay it except necessarily, by their own choice, and by means of their own choice. God will demand no price from anyone they do not choose for themselves. More bizzarely, because God also contains infinite mercy as well as infinite justice (but cannot violate the definition of his own nature), he has an additional contribution to make. There is no price he demands that we did not choose for ourselves. And there is no price he demands that he is not willing to pay himself, on our behalf.

I think all this lead up about the concept of God and the concept of sin draw us necessarily to these two conclusions. I could get into further discussions about the afterlife and what it really is or means that further elaborate these ideas, but I’m not sure it’s necessary. If the afterlife is conceived of as some sort of ultimate fulfillment of the results of our freedom and moral agency and awareness, of our choice of movement toward or away from the highest conception and embodiment of the good, true, and beautiful, either unity with God or separation from him, then ultimately it’s just a final extension of the concepts to their logical conclusions, the removal of the delay and truce that gives space and time for human freedom (and its attendant suffering and triumphs) to play out. It’s just God making space, but not making space for it forever.

At some point, journeys must resolve their necessary courses, and creation cannot be held hostage by evil forever. God may delay it almost infinitely long, to our eyes, allowing us to realize states that grieve him terribly, out of love for us and a desire for humanity to have their chance to take their moral agency to its fulfillment, to have the time and opportunity to live it out and come to him. But at some point, individually (and universally if one brings in Revelations), that opportunity for good and evil in a single life must reach a limit, the ability of evil to wreck its consequences upon the innocent ended. The meaning of the individual story must be decided by having an end. So the afterlife is just the consummation of that journey toward unity or separation from the divine.

How such deep things are judged, luckily, isn’t left to us. But each person will be given what they desire and love most. Unity or separation. Ironically, the Bible says, in unity we will find our truest, unique selves. And in separation we will lose it. If God literally is the summation of life and order and goodness and truth and beauty, what then will remain if a final separation from these things is granted? I don’t know. But it will be something that became what it wanted to be, and yet something so small that even an infinity of it would weigh nothing beyond a whisper in your hand.

I don’t think when we play at life that we play at a game with no stakes. That would be a game without meaning, and whether we want it or not that’s not the kind of world we find within our own consciousness. We play for the highest stakes imaginable, for our own souls and destiny, and the goodness and beauty around us. I can’t really pretend to make any certain guesses about the afterlife, or even demonstrate if it’s a literal reality. But literal or conceptual, it’s just the necessary extension and conclusion of the concepts I’ve already explored reaching their inevitable resolution.

God necessarily contradicts evil. It’s amazing that he allows it at all, by allowing moral agency. It is a most strange thing to discover in the universe. To free the world from evil, evil cannot be allowed free rein forever. The standoff has to be broken; goodness can’t be held hostage forever. Life cannot be allowed to exist forever next to its own annihilation and denial, death. At some point death, which is only the denial of and breakdown of the essence of life (literally as well as symbolically, for what is death but the end of matter being governed by a higher, non-material purpose and order and intention and so returning to an unorganized state; when we see a corpse and are confused, we are confused because we see the shell and vessel left behind, but the meaning that animated it and gave it form and purpose and significance has gone, leaving just a strange temporary reminder of its effect, like a footprint in the sand), must die.

If life and goodness and order and intent and meaning are conceived as being taken to their fulfillment and ultimate ends in the afterlife, and so presumably also chaos and death and disorder, then inevitably goodness becoming all consuming, and evil becomes nothing. Life, order, purpose, becoming fulfilled, become everything. Everything becomes alive, becomes drawn into it, into God. And disorder, loss of purpose, forgetfulness of meaning, becoming more and more themselves, lose even that bit of life and order whose borrowed structure was all that gave it substance. It becomes unlife when it is allowed to become fully itself, and so becomes nothing. At least that it how it seems to me.

While the truce and balance of the present life is maintained, while unlife is protected from itself and from life (for in reality it is in the nature of both to destroy unlife; life makes order and meaning out of dead matter, and death devours itself back into non-existence in unlife), things go on as they are, giving room for us to choose which to embrace. The life we love isn’t room made from death, for life to have a chance to play out. It’s life played out, with death given a chance to be freely chosen. Life, given the chance, will eradicate death, and death will eradicate itself. Goodness, unrestrained, will devour evil, and evil will devour itself. Only a loan of a bit of goodness and order and meaning keeps it from dissolving itself out of existence.

I suppose this outlook seems to argue for some sort of eradication theory. However, considering that a desire for independent existence apart from the structures of cosmic order and meaning is the end goal of what we call evil, the assertion of me for myself against all larger claims and purposes, perhaps the one bare good that could still be granted us without breaking the terms of the deal, where we get exactly what we asked for, perhaps this could be the one exception. Existence would be the one good we would be allowed to borrow. We did not create it or define it for ourselves, cannot sustain it for ourselves; it’s not a thing we originated, it was a gift. But maybe it’s the one gift we get to keep when all others must be returned by being pushed away by our assertion of independent identity. What that existence would actually be loke and consist of if we were allowed to strip it of everything that wasn’t our own, in our control, of our godhood and mastery and creation, absent anything larger we would have to admit and conform and submit to, I don’t know.

I think we’re far beyond certainties here. But even if we’re only considering these as conceptual realities, and letting their own internal logic play out on them, it seems that we’ve got some food for thought. The logical necessities of the concepts and definitions, the logical conclusions that proceed as a direct result of the features inherent to those ideas, seem to support an end result not dissimilar to ideas expressed in more poetic terms by the scriptures. Whether that indicates them to be literally accurate predictions of future states is unclear. But I think we can at least be certain that on a purely moral, conceptual stage they do hold water.

Humans were given freedom, as well as awareness; in fact the two are the same, both are the fruit of the tree of good and evil. If we are conscious that there could be a better or worse choice, if we can conceive of an ideal and of purpose, if we realize the existence of genuine possible movement by us either toward or away from it, we are aware of our freedom to do so, and the terrible burden of choice and responsibility for those choices it puts on us. Our very awareness of our choices generates our responsibility, because we aren’t unconscious; we are aware that the choice exists, that the standards that define the choices exist.

The freedom that we enjoy over animals is not physical freedom, which they also have, but moral freedom. The freedom to move toward or away from the ideal, to realize different alternative states that are meaningfully different, closer or further from our ideal. We can seek to reduce ourselves into unconsciousness, back to a state like animals, not knowing whether one way could be better or worse than another or lead to a better or worse self, a healthier or less healthy development of our world, and often people do that. Alcohol helps. And many other things. They reduce us to a state of nihilistic, instinctive moral unconsciousness, deprive us of our higher thinking, our superego, and relieve us of its attendant burdens, freeing us to pursue our own personal bliss. But we surrender much for such ignorant freedom.

The avoidance of pain and growth is not something that enables the healthy development of humans. Any good psychologist knows that the key to overcoming fears is not avoidance, but deliberate exposure; the development of strength, not the preservation of weakness. We don’t grow stronger and greater by avoiding burdens, but by shouldering them.

I feel like I’m off in the weeds in this last bit. I think my point was that moral freedom, as well as guilt and responsibility, are a natural consequence of our higher consciousness, of being the sort of things we are, and you can’t remove them without voluntarily descending back into unconsciousness and ceasing to be what we are. We are moral agents, and the attendant burdens of that agency are inevitable consequences of it. The burden it brings of shame and insufficiency and guilt is great, but the benefits are equally great. We can affect our own destiny for the better. We can choose to move toward health or unhealth, something no animal can do. We can create and find meaning.

If all we and all our meaning is already contained in ourselves, then there is no real journey to be taken, because we have already arrived and will be fully there no less at the beginning than at the end. There’s no out there to explore or meet, nothing in the universe bigger than our own tiny, arbitrary selves. In a big universe where there are real places to go, things to meet, challenges to overcome, tests to endure, temptations to resist, progress and growth to be missed or achieved, there’s meaning and purpose to be found. There’s a true adventure, because the dangers are real, as are the rewards, and the choices you make aren’t arbitrary but make a real difference.

So, to sum some thoughts up, whatever atonement theory one comes up with, sin and guilt (or, more positively, responsibility) are necessary elements of what it means to be human. Justice and the punishment of sin are necessary elements of what it means to be God. This leaves us in a place that is both the greatest opportunity as well as the greatest burden in all creation.

Those positions are all inevitable, contained in the meaning of what it is to be human and what it is to be God. For our comfort, we can extract one further truth from them. That God will ask no one to pay a price they did not choose for themselves. And the story of Jesus adds one more truth to our utter shock and bewilderment. That there is no price God demands that he will not pay on our behalf. That, to me, seems the greatest shock in all of speculative philosophy, because it seems to be something no one could have imagined, least of all the Jews. All these other truths seem necessary and clear and unavoidable purely on the grounds of the fundamental meaning of the key terms, regardless of whatever theories may be added to them.

How is it all meant to work, in all its technicalities? At the level of the great fundamental realities that govern life and truth and the world itself? I really don’t know. I don’t have a theory on that. Like I said earlier, I’m only reaching these fundamental realities by analogy and metaphor and tokens and mediators, not grasping them as they are in themselves, so I’m not sure I could say anything without worrying whether I was only creating confusion by pretending to talk in glib pedestrian terms of academic construction about the laws and structures that govern and define thought and truth and the universe itself. I might worry, like a Renaissance artist, that my painting would give children the idea that God really had a robe and beard. So I have the beginnings of ideas, I have some conditions I can set my thoughts to following, but I feel too out of my depth to make any easy pronouncements or confident statements.

One final thing I would say about my own approach and theories is that they’re not for everyone. This might seem to violate the categorical imperative that whatever rule you impose should be capable of being made universal in some way. I think my own ideas are dangerous and could cause some major errors and bad results in other people. An immature thinker, or someone coming from a very different background than myself, would use the ideas I toy with very differently that I would. My ideas, in the hands of a zealot, would play out very different to how a somewhat overintellectualized, emotionally reluctant person like myself would use them.

I think the Bible rises to the level at which we are able to engage it. For children, or for the unstudied, it gives them what they need in ways they can understand and will mostly accomplish the goals intended. People like me sit on couches of higher criticism, trying to solve conundrums of fine details in approach that don’t trouble others. And that’s fine; you need a small minority of people like me to sit outside and notice when there’s a problem connected to these matters that needs to be spoken about. For many people, getting too deep into these complications and criticisms would just erode their ability to live out the truths they need to bear, or would provide too powerful of weapons to wield against their enemies.

And that’s always a risk with differing perspectives and corrective and balancing truths. It’s hard not to take them too far in response to what we have seen and been harmed by. People suffer under tyranny and then go wild in their freedom. People suffer in their nihilism or hedonism then go wild in their tyranny. It’s a protective instinct as well as a byproduct of individual perspective and our general ability to abstract from experience to larger conceptual truths.

First, it’s protective. If someone comes at you with a knife, you don’t wish you had a similar or smaller knife, you wish you had a gun. You don’t wish for parity of response, you wish for a means that would completely overwhelm and preclude their act. So when we see someone draw a conceptual dagger that pains and threatens us, we don’t try to negotiate it into a neutral entity between us that we both can wield for our mutual benefit, we draw our conceptual sword and cut them back twice as deep.

Second, it’s a byproduct of our individual perspective. We see things from a subjective and relative postion. The things we see are often not in themselves relative or subjective, but our experience of them is. They have particularity, history, our experience itself has a character. I’m going to be really bothered by some things and not bothered by others. If I’m someone who has been hurt a lot by a certain kind of people or idea, because of where and how I happen to live, I’m going to see exactly what’s wrong with them and hit back (disproportionately, probably). But someone else will likely have been hurt by people like me and have been helped by those ideas I was attacking. And we often can’t or just won’t see each other’s perspectives, only our own. We reason most easily from our own experience, and generalize it to be universal.

And that’s the third item, our general ability to reason from experience to larger abstract truths. It’s built into us as children. We are heuristic machines. It allows us to learn language, as we move from mere instances of noise to categories of meaning. We test an action and observe the reaction, and eventually figure out that we can interact with an object and it will behave according to certain principles. It’s very helpful in teaching us, “Ah, this leads to that; so this is bad, that is good.”

But, because of our limited experience, we’re not always right. Thus the tendency toward anecdotal evidence. Here’s what I experienced, therefore I draw this conclusion as truth. But maybe I didn’t test it enough, maybe something was clouding my judgment and affecting my process, maybe there is more to it than I know.

All of these three qualities are parts of us that help us learn, and learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of others, but they can also lead us into danger if we’re not keely aware of our own process and perspective. A little bit of truth in the wrong hands can be just as dangerous as a lie, maybe even more dangerous, because what truth it does have, imperfectly as we may grasp it, has power. And used incorrectly that power can harm and enslave us rather than free us. And it’s been proven time and again, both ideologically and historically, that our reveling in our newfound freedom from tyranny often only deliver us into a new kind of slavery.

So it’s always a risk declaring revolution and freedom from chains, because often you’re actually depriving people of needed support, not only cutting confining bonds, or merely offering them new bonds in place of their old ones. Which is why I’m always so nervous about sharing my own ideas. I don’t have enough confidence in myself that I’m not acting in error, and I’m not sure I won’t actually make things worse.

Most people aren’t me, and don’t operate like me. And there’s this natural tendency for us to seek out the things that validate rather than temper our personal experience and feelings and prejudices. Most people also prefer to consider the best version of their own outlook, rather than the worst one, to consider its relative merits. So it’s easy to miss the dangers were falling into. I prefer the opposite; I like considering the worst version of something, but this can also be paralyzing because I see how easily everything that presents as good could go wrong, how all liberation can end so easily in slavery.

Lately I feel less and less like it’s safe to share thoughts, especially complex ones. Right now there’s nothing that grieves me as much as what conservative Christians have become, except maybe liberal Christians. And all they do is to keep driving each other to further extremes, revealing fresh hells within one another, inventing new tyrannies and lies and enticing deceit to ensnare their followers, crafting larger and weapons to wield against one another, and in between them the faith is being cut to ribbons.

They say the most terrible things about each other, and the awful truth is that they’re both completely right about each other, and become and make each other more right every day. In an ideal world, they would unite and balance and restrain and complement one another, like a good marriage, but instead they’ve achieved a cycle of ruination, driving one another further and further into the worst, most unbalanced versions of themselves, unable to see or correct their natural excesses. It’s like a snake with two heads devouring itself from both ends. Whatever one side doesnt ruin and devour and distort, the other side will.

And I find myself just hating them both and unable to watch it play out, feeling no hope, and wanting no part of it. Just let the coming conflict come, hope to ride it out, and maybe pick up the pieces when it’s over. That feeling of inevitable hopelessness, that no one, nowhere, is safe and all will be eventually drawn into madness and there’s nothing that can be done to stop it and it’s all just being destroyed in different ways from all directions has very much shaped my mental outlook lately.

I don’t want to hear what any Christians have to say about anything because they’re all being sucked into a world where their conservative culture is absorbing their faith and providing and determining all their values, or a world where their liberal culture is absorbing their faith and providing and determining all their values. Actual truth means nothing, and their faiths grow more and more similar in content to exactly what their political culture teaches and becomes more and more pointless and redundant and unable to offer anything greater. They just become religiousized echo chambers of the current secular popular values. They have nothing offer, no conflicts to raise, no criticisms to refine with; they’re salt without saltiness.

And I understand why. Resisting the demands of cultural conformity is incredibly hard, because its weapons are very subtle and tug on our own natural instincts, insights, and preferences. We self select into different camps that reinforce and validate our prejudices and our wounds and fears, and those camps feed them with reassurance that we were right to feel how we do and should feel it even more and find even more reasons to feel even more that way.

And if we don’t fall in line, they wage a terrible war of guilt and criticism and denigration against us, labeling us agents of chaos and stupidity, bigots and heretics. And that’s very painful; most people can’t handle the pressure of being labeled the “bad guys” for long, and will react either with capitulation or deep resentment, which will only drive them deeper into one camp or the other.

It’s hard to say who will be jailing who first or waging a war of open extermination first. They’ll both have justified it, and both rightly so, in many ways, having become the enemies each deserves. And I personally just feel paralyzed in despair by it, seeing friends from both sides lobbing grenades of insanity and unreason at one another, and both completely blind to their essential sameness in what they’ve become and the tactics they use. And that’s all I have to say about that.