The A Priori Necessity of God's Self-Sacrifice

The historical evidence of Jesus' life and death is near incontrovertible, despite there being outlying objections from a variety of insupportable sources mostly because the best historical record of the events of his life are from the Bible which clearly document his existence from a few independent eyewitness sources (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) that were each in turn tortured to death in order to get them to recant their accounts.  But this is not today's topic and I won't be debating it here.

Instead I want to talk about the A Priori necessity of Christ.  That is, of God's on-earth sacrifice to pay for the sins of the world.  The demonstration is an Ethical One and relies essentially on the idea of Justice and the Nature of God as that Necessary Being which makes it possible that there are contingent beings (which are, ipso facto, not God).

In particular, there is the question of of evil.  How could God create something that would make it even possible that there be evil in the world?  What a cruel thing to do!  We are left with a few possibilities.  God might not be Good, that is, God might be Evil in which case, God in creating the world might have made it just to torture us (and everything else).  But supposing that God is in fact as usually accounted, Good (for various reasons, again which I will not address here, but have addressed elsewhere), how could the Good God create Evil things?

This argument will proceed as follows:

First I will tell a story that is possible - the story of how a Good God could create Evil Things.  Then I will show why any other account is simply impossible.

THE STORY

On the supposition that God is Good, then in particular God is unerringly Just, Merciful, Loving, Truthful, Kind, etc.

In creating other conscious beings, God loved them by giving them their consciousness, and furthermore, control over themselves and their environs (us).  To not have done either of these things would have been cruel (to make us slaves or automata incapable of love ourselves).  But in giving us control over ourselves and our environs it becomes possible for us to do Evil Things as well documented in any good history book.

But how could a Good and Just God allow evil things to go running around the world inflicting their evil on other conscious things that God created?

If something performs an evil act, the just and kind thing to do is to nullify that act by preventing it beforehand, that is, by not creating them at all.

But then God could not have created ANY free conscious beings and all the world would simply be automata - mindless slaves.

However, God HIMSELF can suspend punishment - that is forgive - the sins of the conscious free beings since those sins are against God and his Creation.  When we do something evil to another person, we hurt something that God made, and therefore are injuring God's property and therefore indebted to God.

But no person is capable of paying the debt for the damage done by their own evil.  We can compensate for our evil in some ways by dying, but we can not repair the damage we have done to the rest of God's creation merely by dying.  For that we need something more, in particular, plenary forgiveness.

Plenary forgiveness essentially means that God will suspend his requirement for justice for his damages.  Indeed, Jesus Himself has promised that whoever believes Him will not be judged, but has already passed from death to life.  That is, not only is there no guilty verdict, there's no trial.

God -can- do this because it is God's property that is damaged and therefore God is the primary victim of all evil.


The God that did do that is God of Gods, Lord of Lords and King of Kings.