Beyond Justification: an Interview with Jon DePue

Link to buy "Beyond Justification:" amzn.to/49yfPEM.
All Amazon links are associate links, wherein I receive a percentage of your total purchase.

[@ethanbergen3217]

Great interview!

[@gregory_bloomfield]

I’ve got to get Douglas and Jon’s book. It sounds amazing and is what I’ve become to believe the Gospel truly is.

[@AarmOZ84]

This interview sold me on getting a copy of the book.

[@ApocalypseHere]

Awesome! Glad to hear it!

[@warrenroby6907]

That Brian Zahnd wrote the Foreword is a good indication to me.

[@xophermc]

You guys are awesome!

[@theo55philus]

Thanks so much, Stephen, for doing this interview. This is an important book and a significant turn in interpretation of Paul that I hope will reverberate through mainline Christian and evangelical communities. I shared the interview with my zoom Barth reading group who had Jon's co-author, Douglas Campbell, as our guest a while back. Please keep doing your good and valuable work.

[@StephenDMorrison]

Thanks for the kind words! I agree the book is very good and important for the church.

[@pathfinding4687]

I think the problem with much of our Christian view of God's retribution is that we don't apply the correct hermeneutics to scripture. When God communications to Bronze age polytheists (which is what the early stage Israelites where only they gave their loyalty to God while not necessarily holding that there is in fact only one God). So God spoke to them in a language that they could related to and also in a way that was befitting their level of evolution in terms of spiritual and cultural refinement. An example of this would be God giving guidance on how to treat a slave well. This didn't imply that God sanctions slavery but is rather using a step by step education to first show people that those in slavery are human beings with rights and innate value so that when they were ready, they could accept the idea that slavery is wrong. So when God talks about being angry or irritated with His fallen children, it is often like a mother furrowing her eyebrows when giving a command to her children well before she is 'actually' irritated or angry with the child's disobedience. But most of all, our mistake is in seeing God through the lens of a fallen heart. A heart that through a lineage going back tens of thousands of years was 'un-engrafted' from God and engrafted to Satan/Lucifer who became the fallen, false god of this world. That being the case, we project onto God our own fallen, vengeful, worldview. And to be fair, it suited God's purpose early on to let people fear Him in order to motivate them towards holiness. However, God is a loving parent, not a brutal overseer as the Egyptian task masters were. God is actually more responsible for our fallen state than we are. Even though God is entirely innocent, God at least created us and our reality so takes responsibility for the results even when things go wrong due to our ancestors Adam & Even abusing their free will and falling. We, on the other hand, were born fallen and through no fault of our own at all. We later commit personal sins and at least that is something we have to take responsibility for. But it is a mistake to declare that we deserve to be punished for 'being fallen'. It is also a mistake, a fallen heart projection to view God as a being who desires and even needs retribution and punishment. After all, when we fallen children of God reached the point of the time of Jesus, it was time for God to build on what was already established in the Old Testament and to introduce the idea of forgoing retribution and instead forgiving and loving. An eye for an eye is a 'limiting' system for those who do not have the love to forgive. Jesus clearly stated that we should let go of the 'an eye for an eye' philosophy and instead love and forgive our enemy and those who persecute us. Then are we to suggest that we are held to a higher standard than God who can not do this and instead needs retribution? God is a loving parent and can generate far more and much more pure love than we coul d hope to. God can forgive sins and this forgiveness can be paid for with his love, not with our enduring punishment so that God can feel satisfied. And certainly not that God would instead have his innocent, pure and perfect son tortured to death so He can feel satisfied enough to forgive our sins. The mistake here is in viewing all this through a 'legal' lens rather than the more real but less romantic sounding 'mechanical' lens. God does not see us as being born guilty and deserving of punishment. God sees us as being born spiritually sick and requiring treatment. They are not the same. The treatment by take the form of hardship and as with a very small child receiving medical treatment such as stitches or an operation with a long painful recovery period, the experience of it may be indistinguishable from punishment. But treatment and punishment are not the same thing, do not serve the same purpose and take very different forms. Consider an only child with leukaemia who's parents also have the same bone marrow (blood production) disease. What is needed for the child's salvation? Well, their parents need to bring about the birth of another child who is free of sickness and who has purified blood. Then the sick child needs to undergo preparation of austerity of the body in the form of chemo therapy which will reduce the life and vitality of the body to near death and also diminish the cancer. Then the healthy child is 'pierced' and his bone marrow is transplanted/engrafted to that of the sick child. This is how God sees us. Born with a hereditary spiritual sickness and in need of engrafting to one born clean and pure and who is one with God. When a baby is born, even into the fallen lineage captured by Satan, at no point does God feel angry to that baby and have a need to punish the child. God feels only deep sorrow and an all consuming desire to care for and treat the child so that it may be healed. Stephen, I like your channel and your sincerity and humility and would be happy to do a talk with you on my channel or on yours.

[@StephenDMorrison]

Thanks for the comment and the kind words about my channel. Feel free to send me an email if you'd like to have me on your channel: stephen @sdmorrison .org (without spaces).

[@pathfinding4687]

@@StephenDMorrison Will do Stephen. Though my channel is still in a KZbin gravity well in terms of subscribers.