P1: A just god does not allow unjust suffering.
P2: Jehovah is a just god.
P3: Jehovah’s penalty for sinning entails suffering eternal damnation.
P4: Jehovah’s just penalty for sinning entails suffering eternal damnation. (P1 – P3)
P5: Christ was made human to redeemed sinners by paying the just penalty for sinning.
P6: Christ experienced, at most, 3 days of damnation.
P7: 3 days of damnation is less than the just eternal damnation sinners must suffer.
P8: Christ did not pay the just penalty for sinning. (P5 – P7)
CONCLUSION: Christ did not redeem sinners. (P4 & P8)
It’s tiring to hear all the various incoherent reasons offered for the arbitrary 3 days of Christ’s death, a pseudo-substitution for the sinner which falls far short of any coherent definition of the “wages of sin”.
Filed under: Divine Innumeracy, redemption, salvation, sin, soteriology
Of course I agree with you Phil, but you know someone’s going to say “Christ suffering != human suffering.”
I think there’s many things that make God absurd, but this actually isn’t one of them.
Thanks, Andrew. Understood, but then they’ll have to explain why Christ had to become human to redeem humans if it was not to suffer as we do.
Here is just a fun illustration of the problem.
Perhaps when Jesus suffers, he suffers ‘harder’ than humans do.
As the Son of G_d, he’s never really suffered before. sort of like when a CEO’s kid has trouble in real life because he had things handed to him on a silver platter.
Because his suffering is worse than, say, a person who is raped and tortured in southeast asia or branded and murdered in a concentration camp or beaten and killed in America for having ‘non-biblical’ beliefs, Jesus’s suffering counts more than the average human. Allowing that his beating, torture and murder followed by some value (3 days or 30 hours, depending on how you measure time) in Hell is much worse than some 18 month old dying of cholera in Africa.
Jesus, what a drama queen.