***Interesting, Mark. What adjective(s) give you heartburn regarding the Atonement:
#1. global
#2. sacrificial
#3. personal
#4. eternal***
The philosophy behind them gives me the heartburn.
Calvin developed the idea of penal substitution in which Christ pays God for the sins of individual people and that is all that there is. This goes against most of Gospel teaching as well as the teaching of the early Church.
Surprisingly, Wiki provides a reasonable explanation:
The classic Anselmian formulation of the satisfaction view should be distinguished from penal substitution. Both are forms of satisfaction doctrine in that they speak of how Christ’s death was satisfactory, but penal substitution and Anselmian satisfaction offer different understandings of how Christ’s death was satisfactory. Anselm speaks of human sin as defrauding God of the honour he is due. Christ’s death, the ultimate act of obedience, brings God great honour. As it was beyond the call of duty for Christ, it is more honour than he was obliged to give. Christ’s surplus can therefore repay our deficit. Hence Christ’s death is substitutionary; he pays the honour instead of us. Penal substitution differs in that it sees Christ’s death not as repaying God for lost honour but rather paying the penalty of death that had always been the moral consequence for sin (e.g., Genesis 2:17; Romans 6:23). The key difference here is that for Anselm, satisfaction is an alternative to punishment, “The honor taken away must be repaid, or punishment must follow.”[1] By Christ satisfying our debt of honor to God, we avoid punishment. In Calvinist Penal Substitution, it is the punishment which satisfies the demands of justice.
Another distinction must be made between penal substitution (Christ punished instead of us) and substitutionary atonement (Christ suffers for us). Both affirm the substitutionary and vicarious nature of the atonement, but penal substitution offers a specific explanation as to what the suffering is for: punishment.[citation needed]
Nearly all of the Church Fathers, including Justin Martyr, Athanasius and Augustine teach substitutionary atonement. Indeed, the doctrine was clearly articulated by the prophet Isaiah in 800 BC. However, the specific interpretation differed as to what this suffering for sinners meant. The early Church Fathers, including Athanasius and Augustine taught that through Christ’s suffering in humanity’s place, he overcame and liberated us from death and the devil.
If we focus on some other adjectives of Calvinist theology: exclusionary, limited, irresistable; and also the reversal of cause and effect such as the practices of the Beatitudes and the perseverence of the saints, that expands my objections to what I consider to be an overwhelming level.
More later, but let it not be said that the core of the Reformation was the restoration of the Gospel itself.