Prof. Dr. Steven D. Paulson and the Rev. Nicholas Hopman, writing in the spring of 2016, present a strange version of the atonement in “Christ, the Hated God.” It appears that they reject the vicarious satisfaction of Jesus Christ as well as Christ’s obedience to the Law on our behalf. Further, it appears that they reject the necessity of Christ shedding His blood on the cross as payment for our sins, the payment of which satisfied God’s wrath. God save us; this is horrible even to write.
Following in the footsteps of the late Gerhard O. Forde, they propose an “atonement” that lies completely outside of the Law, that is, outside of the “legal scheme.” This is a key element in Fordian teaching, which impinges tremendously not only on the doctrines of Law and Gospel, but on justification and sanctification. They clearly reject the Orthodox Lutheran doctrine on the atonement; in fact, in this piece Paulson and Hopman hold it up for ridicule. Theirs truly is a different theology. Here they are:
The symptom of the legal scheme infecting Christ’s atonement is to say that God needs our help in maintaining the sputtering law. In this way, the crucifixion is told as if it were fulfilling God’s own desire or maintaining his eternal essence by somehow completing work that sinners left undone. In short, a sinner needs the cross as the last chance of completing the law. Or, more subtly, God needed the cross for his own self in the form of a sacrificial offering. Yet, when the story of Christ is reversed God neither needs the law, nor the cross within the law. Sinners were the ones who crucified Christ, not the Father’s inner need or the law’s external demands. For that reason we say that God was not forced by his own inner necessity or essence to express his wrath at sin. God’s wrath does not emerge from within him, but from without among sinners. Neither is wrath quelled by mere punishment for sin. God does not need catharsis in order to accept sinners into his kingdom, nor is he waiting for sinners to fulfill the law before he can act.
Lutheran Orthodoxy 