A Theological Interlude...

Here is a thought that occurred to me while thinking about the atonement: Jesus on the cross is God. Then in some way, mysterious as it may be, God “knew” sin as Paul wrote, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God “ (2Co 5:21). So, for sake of argument, Jesus in the hypostatic union became “sin for us” if we are to have a literal reading/understanding of this text then some change had to have happened within the Trinity. God then is more mutable than immutable at least in an existential sense and quite possibly in an ontological sense if this “sin for us” in all its potentiality had to go somewhere and be absorbed in some definitive way as to be eliminated in principle on the cross.

Taking Karl Barth’s concept of “nothingness” and thinking about it with Greg Boyd’s concept of a middle way between the annihilationist and classical view of hell that he outlines in the final chapter of Satan and the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy where he also uses Barth’s “nothingness” in his argument and thinking about these ideas in the context of the cross and atonement what I am proposing is this: evil – which is “nothingness” or “darkness” as it is ultimately devoid of any life (zoa) or “light” when completely separated from God or to borrow from Tillich, “the ground of all being” evil then devoid of “being” in a very real ontological sense is no longer a participant in “the ground of all being.” Then when Jesus is “sin for us” on the cross all sin/evil/missing the mark/nothingness/darkness is absorbed into the “ground of all being” and extinguished into itself in a similar way that matter collapses into itself in a black hole. There “sin for us” is enveloped into itself and its being is “nothingness,” it state is separation in complete self absorption and all this is occurring for the briefest of moments in time (Jesus as God in time) on the cross when Jesus died.

And in that brief window of time, Satan glimpsed his utter and complete defeat into oblivion and nothingness but now cannot comprehend it while in complete self absorption – hence his futile attempts to still conquer grace [But where sin increased, grace increased all the more… (Rom 5:20 b)] In principle then evil/sin on the cross was dealt a death blow (Col 2:15) and is now merely in a state of anticipatory collapse into “nothingness” at the culmination of time at the return of Christ.