- Oct 28, 2006
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I'm not sure anyone has actually answered what the OP asked. She's gotten the impression (presumably from other Christians, and possibly from discussions here) that Christians think Jesus had to pay the penalty that otherwise we would have to pay. But most people here believe the main penalty for sinners is hell. Not just death. Annihilationism (that the only punishment for sin is death) is considered unorthodox here. So why wasn't Jesus sentenced to hell?
Some Christians believe in the "harrowing of hell," that Jesus went there briefly to spring some or all of those who had died before. But that's certainly not equivalent to what Christian tradition says happens to sinners: an eternity of torment.
There are traditional answers to this question, but I haven't seen them given here. I'm not going to give them myself, because I don't believe in penal substitution in the first place.
There's nothing quite like Post-Apostolic Tradition to tie our rational, analytic, even truthful hands behind our backs........................is there?
No, I'm fairly confident that in our reading of Genesis and of the Gospels alone, a robust application of expansive (Jewishly inclined) hermeneutics will indicate that 'death' IS the penalty for human sin; our penalty is to be separated from the Tree of Life. And that's that. It's only when we start importing Greek notions of the afterworld/underworld that we run into mis-interpretations of the Scriptures that lead us into some altered perceptions about punitive teleology in our theology.
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