Moral Government Theology is the underlying theology of various street preachers including Jesse Morrell. In addition, YWAM (Youth With A Mission) continues to utilize MGT teachers such as Jesse Morrell to teach at their evangelism schools.
Cal doesn't mention the names but I am not shy about it. Along with various Pelagians, MGT guys try to palm themselves off as Arminians, but in reality they are not..they are against evangelical Christianity. They deny original sin, imputed righteousness, and justification by faith alone and these are fundamental elements of evangelical Christianity, whether one is Arminian or Reformed.
The False God and Gospel of Moral Government Theology Article ID: DM610 | By: E. Calvin Beisner
Summary
Moral government theology (MGT), rooted in the philosophical definition of freedom as the “power of contrary choice,” denies the fundamental Christian doctrines of God’s perfection in knowledge, goodness, and power; original sin; human moral inability; the substitutionary satisfaction of God’s justice in Christ’s atoning death; redemption; and justification by the crediting of Christ’s righteousness to believers by grace through faith apart from works. As documented in this article, these denials are unbiblical and are so serious as to warrant classifying MGT as non-Christian.
Judy was a former missionary whose faith had collapsed; she no longer believed that God was unchangeably good or faithful or that He even knew all of the future. George (both names have been changed) was another former missionary who ardently rejected the historic belief that Adam’s sin and guilt are shared in by the whole human race. What tied the two together? Both had been taught the same doctrinal system in training with a popular youth mission organization in the 1970s. In one, it brought depression; in the other, pride. Both effects, strangely enough, were fitting. Since the 1960s, a new heretical theology has been infiltrating evangelical circles. Not officially embraced by any well-known denomination or parachurch organization, the system has nevertheless made serious inroads into at least one large and well-known missions organization and has spawned a ministry and publication dedicated to its promotion and defense.[SUP]1[/SUP] This system of doctrine is paradoxically old and new: its elements are old,[SUP]2[/SUP] but the manner in which they are tied together into a complete structure is new.
THE RISE OF MORAL GOVERNMENT THEOLOGY
The system’s major proponents dub it moral government theology. But today’s moral government theology is a far cry from what went by that name two centuries ago, when people as diverse as Jonathan Edwards (a firm Calvinist) and John Wesley (a firm Arminian) both used it to refer to God’s government of moral agents through His moral law as contrasted with His government of the physical creation through physical law. Contemporary moral government theology is principally the brainchild of the late Gordon C. Olson. During the 1930s and 1940s, Olson’s studies led him to believe that God’s foreknowledge is necessarily limited by human free will and that the classical doctrines of original sin, human depravity and moral inability, the Atonement, and justification were as wrong as the classical doctrine of absolute foreknowledge. During the 1960s and 1970s, Olson and an engineering associate of his named Harry Conn began to teach moral government theology for various mission organizations, often in recruiting, motivating, or training young people. Moral government theology (hereafter MGT) first began to spread rapidly when Olson and Conn became regular speakers for Youth With A Mission (YWAM), which has since become one of the larger youth missionary organizations in the world. Contrary to YWAM’s repeated denials that MGT was an important part of its teaching, it was in YWAM training that tens of thousands of students from the late 1970s through the 1980s, and some even into the 1990s, learned MGT (although today some YWAM leaders speak against MGT).[SUP]3[/SUP] Although Conn and others have published on MGT,[SUP]4[/SUP] Olson’s writings and taped lectures have been definitive of the system and the most important influence in the movement.[SUP]5[/SUP] For that reason, most of this analysis will focus on Olson’s writings.[SUP]6[/SUP]
ROOT AND BRANCHES
At the root of MGT lies a philosophical assumption about freedom. According to Olson, “the power to the contrary is essential to free agency — A free moral agent may always act contrary to any influence, not destructive to his freedom, that may be brought to bear upon him.”[SUP]7[/SUP] Indeed, “voluntary responsible action involves the possibility of non-compliance or of contrary choice — the freedom of uncertainty. Virtuous action must be voluntary action. If no contrary choice, then no virtuous choice….”[SUP]8[/SUP] No choice may be called virtuous, then, unless the one who made it might just as well have chosen the opposite. Add to this philosophical definition of freedom the assertion that God and man are inherently free, and important doctrines necessarily follow. First, man is born morally neutral and is always capable of choosing whether to sin. Olson insists that “holiness and sin are free voluntary acts of will or states of mind, and, although strongly influenced, are not caused by any internal force of nature, tendency, or instinct”; that “sin is not…an abstract thing which invades and lodges somewhere in our personalities, but is rather an orderly sequence of wrong choices and conduct”; that “depravity strongly influences, but does not compel, toward wrong action. We choose to follow our inclinations when we sin”; that “moral depravity…is always a voluntary development which results from the wrong choices of our wills”; that “the universality of sin in the world is not to be accounted for, therefore, by some fixed causation in our personality inherited by birth”; and that “so-called inability is a question of ‘will not’ rather than ‘cannot’ obey God’s reasonable requirements.”[SUP]9[/SUP] Each person is hence condemned only for his or her own sin. For Olson, “a contradiction would exist in the Bible if any statement could be found declaring our guilt for Adam’s sin.”[SUP]10[/SUP] In his view, “if the Bible affirmed that we are held accountable for other’s (sic) sins, and particularly for Adam’s sin, this would become such a gross injustice in the economy of God as to erect a barrier to intelligent thought and the meaning of guilt.”[SUP]11[/SUP] Why? Because “all sin consists in sinning — there can be no moral character but in moral acts.”[SUP]12[/SUP] Second, man’s future free choices cannot be foreknown by God; if they were then they would no longer be free. The “future choices of moral beings,” Olson writes, “when acting freely in their moral agency, have not been brought into existence as yet and thus are not fixities or objects of possible knowledge.”[SUP]13[/SUP] Thus, “many Bible passages, when taken in their natural meaning, appear to indicate that God does not have absolute foreknowledge over all his own future actions, nor over all those of His moral creatures.”[SUP]14[/SUP] Therefore God’s foreknowledge is limited, and He learns new things as people make choices. Third, the principle of contrary choice “applies to actions of the Godhead as well as to the self-caused actions of men.”[SUP]15[/SUP] Therefore: (1) God cannot foreknow His own future choices, for if He did then He would not make those choices freely, and He would cease to be a moral agent. (2) God’s moral character, like man’s, depends constantly on His choices: “Moral attributes involve the element of choice, or have a voluntary causation to them. They are not natural attributes in that they are not endowments of God’s existence, but are moral in the sense that they are the result of a disposition of will. They exist because each Member of the Godhead perpetually chooses that they should be so. Moral character must be an active something. It cannot be a static fixity of some sort back of the will, causing its actions” (emphasis added).[SUP]16[/SUP] Hence, the absolutely unfettered will, not the moral nature, lies at the root of God’s (or any moral agent’s) choices and character. This follows necessarily from Olson’s first principle, already cited: “Voluntary responsible action involves the possibility of non-compliance or of contrary choice — the freedom of uncertainty….If no contrary choice, then no virtuous choice….”[SUP]17[/SUP] The shocking implication of this last idea — that God is morally changeable — might appear to contradict another of Olson’s statements: “God’s nature and moral character imposes limitations. God is able to do whatever He wills (except with moral beings [sic]), but His will is limited to doing those things which are in harmony with His wise and holy and perfect character. God cannot do things contrary to Himself. This is not a defect in Divine omnipotence but a perfection of the Divine Being.”[SUP]18[/SUP] But Olson chooses his terms carefully. “Moral character,” he says, “is dynamic; it is the whole personality in action; it is what we are doing with our endowments or abilities of personality and the moral understanding which we possess.”[SUP]19[/SUP] If it is true that Olson believes that God’s “will is limited to doing those things which are in harmony with His wise and holy and perfect character” (emphasis added),[SUP]20[/SUP] it is also true that Olson believes God’s character “cannot be a static fixity of some sort back of the will, causing its actions,” but “is the whole personality in action; it is what [God is] doing with [His] endowments or abilities of personality and the moral understanding which [He] possess[es].”[SUP]21[/SUP] As Olson puts it, “the will determines the nature or character, rather than the nature the will” (emphasis added).[SUP]22[/SUP] Should God ever choose to make His character other than wise and holy and perfect — and no “internal force of nature” can prevent His doing so — then of course that wise and holy and perfect character will no longer limit what He wills; a different sort of character will do so. To put it simply, we have no assurance that God will not decide tomorrow to become the Devil. Not only God’s knowledge and moral character but even His power collapses before the inexorable implications of human autonomy in MGT. Olson hints at this in a parenthetical phrase in his statement of the limits on God’s will, cited above: “God is able to do whatever He wills (except with moral beings), but His will is limited to doing those things which are in harmony with His wise and holy and perfect character” (emphasis added).[SUP]23[/SUP] He makes it explicit when he writes, “Man as an endowed moral being has been given the ability to limit the omnipotence of God in his sphere of life. Mankind by their rebellion against God and their obstinacy in refusing the mercy and forgiveness through the atoning death of Christ have imposed very great limitations upon God’s will and happiness….God in creating moral creatures with the power of contrary choice made this a possibility” (emphasis added).[SUP]24 [/SUP]The implications of these ideas do not end here. They yield a whole new understanding of justification and salvation as well. Since Olson explicitly denies that man inherits sin or guilt from Adam (i.e., he denies the doctrine of original sin — the imputation of Adam’s sin and guilt to his posterity), it should come as no surprise that he also denies the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to believers. He finds the cause of salvation not in Christ’s atoning death but in the believer’s self-reformation: “Romans 5:12-19 does not establish the dogma of the literal imputation of Adam’s sin to all his posterity, but merely affirms in a parallelism that just as Adam’s sin was the occasion, not cause, of the voluntary disobedience of all men, so Christ is the occasion, not cause, of the salvation offered to all men.”[SUP]25[/SUP] “The active obedience or holiness of Christ,” Olson says, “is not legally imputed to the believer.”[SUP]26[/SUP] And if Christ’s righteousness is not credited to the believer, neither is the believer’s sin credited to Christ on the cross. For sin is not a principle; sins are isolated, individual acts only. But if our sins are not borne by Christ on the cross, how are we to be freed from the penalty due them? Ah, the question assumes that a penalty is due, but none is! “A voluntary disposition of mercy and forgiveness prevails equally among all the Members of the Godhead. The Godhead is without personal vindictiveness. The problems of forgiveness are not personal but governmental. God does not require an exact payment for sin to satisfy retributive justice, but only requires that an atonement shall satisfy public justice and all the problems of a full and free reconciliation in His government of moral beings.”[SUP]27[/SUP] This denial of any demand for the satisfaction of retributive (or “vindictive”) justice in God leads Olson to deny that Christ’s atoning death was the true payment of a penalty to satisfy that justice:
The sacrifice of Christ is not the payment of a debt, nor is it a complete satisfaction of justice for sin. It is a Divinely-appointed [sic] condition which precedes the forgiveness of sin….Christ’s sufferings took the place of a penalty, so that His sufferings have the same effect in reconciling God to man, and procuring the forgiveness of sin, that the sinner’s endurance of the punishment due to his sins would have had. The sufferings of Christ were not a substituted penalty, but a substitute for a penalty (emphasis added).[SUP]28 [/SUP]
The atonement of Christ “rendered satisfaction to public justice (a demonstration before all that rebellion against authority will be punished), as distinguished from retributive or vindictive justice.”[SUP]29[/SUP] Here, then, is MGT in a nutshell:
(1) Freedom entails the power of contrary choice, and God and man are both free. (2) God is finite, imperfect, and changeable in His knowledge, character, and power, and He does not require vengeance for sin. (3) Man is perfectly free, which implies that he cannot have inherited either sin or a morally corrupt nature from Adam, and his freedom necessarily limits God’s knowledge, will, and power. (4) The gospel is that “the atoning death of Christ,” as Olson deigns to call it — nay, even Christ Himself — “is the occasion, not cause, of the salvation offered to all men.”[SUP]30[/SUP] The “consequences of right and wrong moral action” in MGT “are based solely upon personal merit or demerit as known only to God” and “are and will be in exact accord or in proportion to merit and demerit” (emphasis added).[SUP]31[/SUP]
By defining freedom as the “power of contrary choice,” Olson is forced ultimately to deny nearly the whole defining body of Christian faith: original sin, unregenerate man’s moral inability, the imputation of Christ’s righteousness in justification (parallel to the imputation of Adam’s sin in condemnation), the substitutionary and satisfactory atonement for sin in Christ’s death, and the moral and intellectual infinity, perfection, and immutability of God. And Olson reaches his conclusions not on the basis of Scripture but by inferences from philosophical assumptions. What might Olson have found had he subjected his first principle and his inferences to the light of Scripture?
HUMAN FREEDOM AND SIN IN SCRIPTURE
Scripture knows nothing of freedom as the “power of contrary choice.” Real freedom is not autonomy but deliverance from the slavery to sin in which all humans are born, into the glorious freedom of the children of God: “But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness” (Rom. 6:17-18, emphases added). Try as he might, man never can escape being Number Two — he must always be someone’s slave. The serpent’s trickery was to make Adam and Eve think that by disobeying God they could begin to rule their own lives — they could be Number One. Instead, rejecting God’s rule only meant embracing Satan’s (Eph. 2:2). “But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:22-23). Far from human freedom being the “power of contrary choice,” the very exercise of that power robbed human beings of the only freedom for which we were made: the freedom of obedience to our rightful Sovereign. And no “power of contrary choice” in us will ever free us from sin’s tyranny, for we are “dead in trespasses and sins” and “by nature children of wrath” (Eph. 2:1, 3). We suffer, as Luther put it in the title of one of his most famous books, from The Bondage of the Will; our wills are bound to our corrupt, rebellious, sinful nature inherited from Adam.[SUP]32[/SUP]What we need is not a free will but a new, holy, obedient, righteous nature (2 Cor. 5:17) to which our will can be bound. And we cannot produce that new nature for ourselves — least of all by an act of our own will, which is bound by the contrary nature. Dead, rebellious humans do not — cannot — repent, believe, and reform their lives.
But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus, in order that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, that no one should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Eph. 2:4-10, emphasis added)
Cal doesn't mention the names but I am not shy about it. Along with various Pelagians, MGT guys try to palm themselves off as Arminians, but in reality they are not..they are against evangelical Christianity. They deny original sin, imputed righteousness, and justification by faith alone and these are fundamental elements of evangelical Christianity, whether one is Arminian or Reformed.
The False God and Gospel of Moral Government Theology Article ID: DM610 | By: E. Calvin Beisner
Summary
Moral government theology (MGT), rooted in the philosophical definition of freedom as the “power of contrary choice,” denies the fundamental Christian doctrines of God’s perfection in knowledge, goodness, and power; original sin; human moral inability; the substitutionary satisfaction of God’s justice in Christ’s atoning death; redemption; and justification by the crediting of Christ’s righteousness to believers by grace through faith apart from works. As documented in this article, these denials are unbiblical and are so serious as to warrant classifying MGT as non-Christian.
Judy was a former missionary whose faith had collapsed; she no longer believed that God was unchangeably good or faithful or that He even knew all of the future. George (both names have been changed) was another former missionary who ardently rejected the historic belief that Adam’s sin and guilt are shared in by the whole human race. What tied the two together? Both had been taught the same doctrinal system in training with a popular youth mission organization in the 1970s. In one, it brought depression; in the other, pride. Both effects, strangely enough, were fitting. Since the 1960s, a new heretical theology has been infiltrating evangelical circles. Not officially embraced by any well-known denomination or parachurch organization, the system has nevertheless made serious inroads into at least one large and well-known missions organization and has spawned a ministry and publication dedicated to its promotion and defense.[SUP]1[/SUP] This system of doctrine is paradoxically old and new: its elements are old,[SUP]2[/SUP] but the manner in which they are tied together into a complete structure is new.
THE RISE OF MORAL GOVERNMENT THEOLOGY
The system’s major proponents dub it moral government theology. But today’s moral government theology is a far cry from what went by that name two centuries ago, when people as diverse as Jonathan Edwards (a firm Calvinist) and John Wesley (a firm Arminian) both used it to refer to God’s government of moral agents through His moral law as contrasted with His government of the physical creation through physical law. Contemporary moral government theology is principally the brainchild of the late Gordon C. Olson. During the 1930s and 1940s, Olson’s studies led him to believe that God’s foreknowledge is necessarily limited by human free will and that the classical doctrines of original sin, human depravity and moral inability, the Atonement, and justification were as wrong as the classical doctrine of absolute foreknowledge. During the 1960s and 1970s, Olson and an engineering associate of his named Harry Conn began to teach moral government theology for various mission organizations, often in recruiting, motivating, or training young people. Moral government theology (hereafter MGT) first began to spread rapidly when Olson and Conn became regular speakers for Youth With A Mission (YWAM), which has since become one of the larger youth missionary organizations in the world. Contrary to YWAM’s repeated denials that MGT was an important part of its teaching, it was in YWAM training that tens of thousands of students from the late 1970s through the 1980s, and some even into the 1990s, learned MGT (although today some YWAM leaders speak against MGT).[SUP]3[/SUP] Although Conn and others have published on MGT,[SUP]4[/SUP] Olson’s writings and taped lectures have been definitive of the system and the most important influence in the movement.[SUP]5[/SUP] For that reason, most of this analysis will focus on Olson’s writings.[SUP]6[/SUP]
ROOT AND BRANCHES
At the root of MGT lies a philosophical assumption about freedom. According to Olson, “the power to the contrary is essential to free agency — A free moral agent may always act contrary to any influence, not destructive to his freedom, that may be brought to bear upon him.”[SUP]7[/SUP] Indeed, “voluntary responsible action involves the possibility of non-compliance or of contrary choice — the freedom of uncertainty. Virtuous action must be voluntary action. If no contrary choice, then no virtuous choice….”[SUP]8[/SUP] No choice may be called virtuous, then, unless the one who made it might just as well have chosen the opposite. Add to this philosophical definition of freedom the assertion that God and man are inherently free, and important doctrines necessarily follow. First, man is born morally neutral and is always capable of choosing whether to sin. Olson insists that “holiness and sin are free voluntary acts of will or states of mind, and, although strongly influenced, are not caused by any internal force of nature, tendency, or instinct”; that “sin is not…an abstract thing which invades and lodges somewhere in our personalities, but is rather an orderly sequence of wrong choices and conduct”; that “depravity strongly influences, but does not compel, toward wrong action. We choose to follow our inclinations when we sin”; that “moral depravity…is always a voluntary development which results from the wrong choices of our wills”; that “the universality of sin in the world is not to be accounted for, therefore, by some fixed causation in our personality inherited by birth”; and that “so-called inability is a question of ‘will not’ rather than ‘cannot’ obey God’s reasonable requirements.”[SUP]9[/SUP] Each person is hence condemned only for his or her own sin. For Olson, “a contradiction would exist in the Bible if any statement could be found declaring our guilt for Adam’s sin.”[SUP]10[/SUP] In his view, “if the Bible affirmed that we are held accountable for other’s (sic) sins, and particularly for Adam’s sin, this would become such a gross injustice in the economy of God as to erect a barrier to intelligent thought and the meaning of guilt.”[SUP]11[/SUP] Why? Because “all sin consists in sinning — there can be no moral character but in moral acts.”[SUP]12[/SUP] Second, man’s future free choices cannot be foreknown by God; if they were then they would no longer be free. The “future choices of moral beings,” Olson writes, “when acting freely in their moral agency, have not been brought into existence as yet and thus are not fixities or objects of possible knowledge.”[SUP]13[/SUP] Thus, “many Bible passages, when taken in their natural meaning, appear to indicate that God does not have absolute foreknowledge over all his own future actions, nor over all those of His moral creatures.”[SUP]14[/SUP] Therefore God’s foreknowledge is limited, and He learns new things as people make choices. Third, the principle of contrary choice “applies to actions of the Godhead as well as to the self-caused actions of men.”[SUP]15[/SUP] Therefore: (1) God cannot foreknow His own future choices, for if He did then He would not make those choices freely, and He would cease to be a moral agent. (2) God’s moral character, like man’s, depends constantly on His choices: “Moral attributes involve the element of choice, or have a voluntary causation to them. They are not natural attributes in that they are not endowments of God’s existence, but are moral in the sense that they are the result of a disposition of will. They exist because each Member of the Godhead perpetually chooses that they should be so. Moral character must be an active something. It cannot be a static fixity of some sort back of the will, causing its actions” (emphasis added).[SUP]16[/SUP] Hence, the absolutely unfettered will, not the moral nature, lies at the root of God’s (or any moral agent’s) choices and character. This follows necessarily from Olson’s first principle, already cited: “Voluntary responsible action involves the possibility of non-compliance or of contrary choice — the freedom of uncertainty….If no contrary choice, then no virtuous choice….”[SUP]17[/SUP] The shocking implication of this last idea — that God is morally changeable — might appear to contradict another of Olson’s statements: “God’s nature and moral character imposes limitations. God is able to do whatever He wills (except with moral beings [sic]), but His will is limited to doing those things which are in harmony with His wise and holy and perfect character. God cannot do things contrary to Himself. This is not a defect in Divine omnipotence but a perfection of the Divine Being.”[SUP]18[/SUP] But Olson chooses his terms carefully. “Moral character,” he says, “is dynamic; it is the whole personality in action; it is what we are doing with our endowments or abilities of personality and the moral understanding which we possess.”[SUP]19[/SUP] If it is true that Olson believes that God’s “will is limited to doing those things which are in harmony with His wise and holy and perfect character” (emphasis added),[SUP]20[/SUP] it is also true that Olson believes God’s character “cannot be a static fixity of some sort back of the will, causing its actions,” but “is the whole personality in action; it is what [God is] doing with [His] endowments or abilities of personality and the moral understanding which [He] possess[es].”[SUP]21[/SUP] As Olson puts it, “the will determines the nature or character, rather than the nature the will” (emphasis added).[SUP]22[/SUP] Should God ever choose to make His character other than wise and holy and perfect — and no “internal force of nature” can prevent His doing so — then of course that wise and holy and perfect character will no longer limit what He wills; a different sort of character will do so. To put it simply, we have no assurance that God will not decide tomorrow to become the Devil. Not only God’s knowledge and moral character but even His power collapses before the inexorable implications of human autonomy in MGT. Olson hints at this in a parenthetical phrase in his statement of the limits on God’s will, cited above: “God is able to do whatever He wills (except with moral beings), but His will is limited to doing those things which are in harmony with His wise and holy and perfect character” (emphasis added).[SUP]23[/SUP] He makes it explicit when he writes, “Man as an endowed moral being has been given the ability to limit the omnipotence of God in his sphere of life. Mankind by their rebellion against God and their obstinacy in refusing the mercy and forgiveness through the atoning death of Christ have imposed very great limitations upon God’s will and happiness….God in creating moral creatures with the power of contrary choice made this a possibility” (emphasis added).[SUP]24 [/SUP]The implications of these ideas do not end here. They yield a whole new understanding of justification and salvation as well. Since Olson explicitly denies that man inherits sin or guilt from Adam (i.e., he denies the doctrine of original sin — the imputation of Adam’s sin and guilt to his posterity), it should come as no surprise that he also denies the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to believers. He finds the cause of salvation not in Christ’s atoning death but in the believer’s self-reformation: “Romans 5:12-19 does not establish the dogma of the literal imputation of Adam’s sin to all his posterity, but merely affirms in a parallelism that just as Adam’s sin was the occasion, not cause, of the voluntary disobedience of all men, so Christ is the occasion, not cause, of the salvation offered to all men.”[SUP]25[/SUP] “The active obedience or holiness of Christ,” Olson says, “is not legally imputed to the believer.”[SUP]26[/SUP] And if Christ’s righteousness is not credited to the believer, neither is the believer’s sin credited to Christ on the cross. For sin is not a principle; sins are isolated, individual acts only. But if our sins are not borne by Christ on the cross, how are we to be freed from the penalty due them? Ah, the question assumes that a penalty is due, but none is! “A voluntary disposition of mercy and forgiveness prevails equally among all the Members of the Godhead. The Godhead is without personal vindictiveness. The problems of forgiveness are not personal but governmental. God does not require an exact payment for sin to satisfy retributive justice, but only requires that an atonement shall satisfy public justice and all the problems of a full and free reconciliation in His government of moral beings.”[SUP]27[/SUP] This denial of any demand for the satisfaction of retributive (or “vindictive”) justice in God leads Olson to deny that Christ’s atoning death was the true payment of a penalty to satisfy that justice:
The sacrifice of Christ is not the payment of a debt, nor is it a complete satisfaction of justice for sin. It is a Divinely-appointed [sic] condition which precedes the forgiveness of sin….Christ’s sufferings took the place of a penalty, so that His sufferings have the same effect in reconciling God to man, and procuring the forgiveness of sin, that the sinner’s endurance of the punishment due to his sins would have had. The sufferings of Christ were not a substituted penalty, but a substitute for a penalty (emphasis added).[SUP]28 [/SUP]
The atonement of Christ “rendered satisfaction to public justice (a demonstration before all that rebellion against authority will be punished), as distinguished from retributive or vindictive justice.”[SUP]29[/SUP] Here, then, is MGT in a nutshell:
(1) Freedom entails the power of contrary choice, and God and man are both free. (2) God is finite, imperfect, and changeable in His knowledge, character, and power, and He does not require vengeance for sin. (3) Man is perfectly free, which implies that he cannot have inherited either sin or a morally corrupt nature from Adam, and his freedom necessarily limits God’s knowledge, will, and power. (4) The gospel is that “the atoning death of Christ,” as Olson deigns to call it — nay, even Christ Himself — “is the occasion, not cause, of the salvation offered to all men.”[SUP]30[/SUP] The “consequences of right and wrong moral action” in MGT “are based solely upon personal merit or demerit as known only to God” and “are and will be in exact accord or in proportion to merit and demerit” (emphasis added).[SUP]31[/SUP]
By defining freedom as the “power of contrary choice,” Olson is forced ultimately to deny nearly the whole defining body of Christian faith: original sin, unregenerate man’s moral inability, the imputation of Christ’s righteousness in justification (parallel to the imputation of Adam’s sin in condemnation), the substitutionary and satisfactory atonement for sin in Christ’s death, and the moral and intellectual infinity, perfection, and immutability of God. And Olson reaches his conclusions not on the basis of Scripture but by inferences from philosophical assumptions. What might Olson have found had he subjected his first principle and his inferences to the light of Scripture?
HUMAN FREEDOM AND SIN IN SCRIPTURE
Scripture knows nothing of freedom as the “power of contrary choice.” Real freedom is not autonomy but deliverance from the slavery to sin in which all humans are born, into the glorious freedom of the children of God: “But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you became slaves of righteousness” (Rom. 6:17-18, emphases added). Try as he might, man never can escape being Number Two — he must always be someone’s slave. The serpent’s trickery was to make Adam and Eve think that by disobeying God they could begin to rule their own lives — they could be Number One. Instead, rejecting God’s rule only meant embracing Satan’s (Eph. 2:2). “But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:22-23). Far from human freedom being the “power of contrary choice,” the very exercise of that power robbed human beings of the only freedom for which we were made: the freedom of obedience to our rightful Sovereign. And no “power of contrary choice” in us will ever free us from sin’s tyranny, for we are “dead in trespasses and sins” and “by nature children of wrath” (Eph. 2:1, 3). We suffer, as Luther put it in the title of one of his most famous books, from The Bondage of the Will; our wills are bound to our corrupt, rebellious, sinful nature inherited from Adam.[SUP]32[/SUP]What we need is not a free will but a new, holy, obedient, righteous nature (2 Cor. 5:17) to which our will can be bound. And we cannot produce that new nature for ourselves — least of all by an act of our own will, which is bound by the contrary nature. Dead, rebellious humans do not — cannot — repent, believe, and reform their lives.
But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus, in order that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, that no one should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Eph. 2:4-10, emphasis added)