New England Dogmatics. Maltby Geltson. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Maltby Geltson
Издательство: Ingram
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Религия: прочее
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781532637766
Скачать книгу
direct them to their various appointed ends. God’s moral government describes his specific interaction with rational creatures. President Edwards himself had a robust doctrine of God’s moral government, commenting,

      This brings us to our second thesis:

      By including references to President Edwards amongst these number theses we are intentionally trying to draw attention to the fact that are indeed doctrinal continuities regarding the moral government of God that are rightly labelled “Edwardsian.” Given this, the following thesis is a fairly critical distinction that Edwards’ successor made with some frequency is arguably the principal point of theological departure of the Edwardsians from their mentor.

      3) God’s moral government is revoked by sin, which, strictly speaking, is an offence against the moral law, not God.

      This brings us to our fourth thesis:

      This too is quite an important point of distinction. For where penal substitution demands that the offender suffer a penalty, rectoral justice has clear penal implications and Christ must suffer these implications in order to restore the honor that is due God’s moral law; the difference here being that Christ suffers this penal as an example, not as a substitute for any individual. And this leads us to our final thesis:

      Now, insofar as these five thesis reflect a core sample of those ideas expressed by Edwardsians on the moral government, we can make three summary observations that puts initially seems to put greater theological distance between Edwards and his successors on the matter of the atonement. We shall limit ourselves to just three brief observations in order to bring sufficient shape to the foregoing theses, and to set up our discussion of Crisp’s penal non-substitution.

      II.2. Crisp, Edwards Jr, and Penal Non-Substitution

      According to Crisp, Edwards Jr puts forward a fairly robust model of atonement that deserves the attention of contemporary scholarship, not least for which, its having developed (though often unnoticed and certainly under appreciated) at such a unique period and place in the history of theology. In order to re-invigorate this otherwise diminished model, Crisp exposits the theory for contemporary analysis. Interestingly, in as much as Crisp’s efforts to retrieve Edwards Jr’s model for analysis, it is Crisp’s analysis of Edward Jr that deserves further consideration. For, a wider look at Edwards Jr’s works points both to his development of Crisp’s so-called penal non-substitution model, and rather curiously, what appears to be a version of the doctrine of penal substitution model of atonement. Our engagement with Crisp’s work serves the purpose of showing that the New England model of atonement is perhaps more complex or “thicker” (to borrow a term from Crisp) than Crisp’s account boasts. Indeed, there is far more that is of profitable interest in the literature