then, portrays punishment as rectification rather than retribution. It hurts to pay for sin and thus get rid of it, but getting rid of all sin is the only way to reunification with God. Likewise, MacDonald contends that “primarily, God is not bound to punish sin; he is bound to destroy sin.” * Punishment is a means of God’s primary effort to destroy our sins. As I asked before, if one is forgiven, what need is there to punish? Lewis and MacDonald both imply that it is to destroy our sins. So now I will ask the converse: if one is
The punishment and pain that comes with the destruction of our sins reveals to us what we truly merit in a way that we could not know otherwise. punished and suffers for his or her sins, what need is there to forgive? One might answer that a sin against an infinitely benevolent God is too large a debt to be paid for even by eternal suffering. But that is beside the point because we have already established that God does not find pleasure in seeing the wicked suffer. Lewis points out this human misunderstanding of suffering: “Of sinful pleasure they say, ‘Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences.’” * One cannot pay for the consequences of a sin by suffering for it later. If suffering and punishment do not atone for sin, then what does? The atonement for sin comes from Jesus Christ’s death on the cross, which paid for all sins and thus gave all the ability to embark on the path of atonement. As MacDonald puts it, “Repentance, restitution, confession, prayer for forgiveness, righteous dealing thereafter, is the sole possible, the only true make-up for sin. For nothing less than this did Christ die.” * But why does the destruction of sin have to be painful? Why couldn’t God have made it so that destroying sin does not have to occur through the punishment of sin? We cannot be reborn into the redemption of Christ without first experiencing pain and suffering. The wages of sin is death, suffering and eternal separation from the Father. We cannot be redeemed from these wages, and receive the gift of God, which is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord, until we realize what we truly deserve. The punishment and pain that comes with the destruction of our sins reveals to us what we truly merit in a way that we could not know otherwise. It is one thing to merely state that we deserve nothing less than eternal suffering and separation from God, and another to actually taste, through pain, from what Christ has saved us. I cannot word this better than my friend who said, “This phenomenon is beautifully captured by the sequence of the red lizard, its removal and its subsequent transformation into a magnificent white stallion. How much greater is God’s glory when he chooses to work his redemption precisely in the unlikeliest, most sinful places? How greater the glory in that?” By now it seems we have lost track of both justice
and mercy, but in fact we can finally explain our ablution in terms of both. We see that mercy, secular or divine, is nontransactional (you cannot deserve it) whereas the secular definition of justice is transactional (you pay what you owe; you reap what you sow). Going back to our example of the police officer, he cannot continue to show mercy from MacDonald and Lewis’s theological perspective. If he did, he would no longer be a police officer because he would not be an enforcer of state justice. Likewise, God cannot show divine mercy and still be a divine judge under the transactional definition of justice. Therefore, MacDonald and Lewis both create a nontransactional definition of justice in which atonement for sin is impossible for humans unaided by God. Humans cannot pay for their own atonement; it comes through their will to repent but ultimately it is God who acts to atone. The lustful ghost could not get rid of the lizard himself; he could only ask the spirit to do it for him. Only by divine mercy, which paid for atonement, divine justice is upheld. Resolving these inconsistencies is like raking leaves in autumn: you can toil to make sense of one and yet another will always fall. I hope, as C.S. Lewis does, that “Heaven will solve our problems, but not by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked out from under our feet.We shall see that there never was any problem.”
MacDonald, 3
Lewis, 69
Writer’s Note
I had an interesting conversation with the writing center worker who helped me through this paper. Though he was a stern atheist who called MacDonald and Lewis hucksters and liars, and though I am a Christian who agrees theologically with these two authors, we had a respectful conversation about this topic. More than that, we came to the same conclusion in the end! We literally finished each other’s sentences in coming to the implications of these two authors’ views on justice and mercy. We said that those in Lewis’s Hell are inflicting suffering unto themselves, thus fulfilling transactional justice, which is only possible if individuality is retained (since transactions are necessarily made between individuals). In contrast, Lewis’s Heaven is governed by a non-transactional justice whereby a human can only go as far as to ask God to remove sins but cannot perform this atonement himself/herself. Thus humans must give themselves fully to God in order for divine justice to be served, for this atonement to happen. This comes at the loss of individuality. He saw this as atrocious, and of course he has a right to his own views. But I thought it was beautiful – that we would lose ourselves and become one with God. It’s like MacDonald says as he quotes the Gospel of John, “He brings and is bringing God and man, and man and man, into perfect unity: ‘I in them and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.’” * Andrew Kim is a junior concentrating in neuroscience and human biology.
SPRING 2012
MacDonald, 5
MacDonald, 5; John 17:23 KJV
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