Charles Bledsoe, OP’s title – Atonement or Forgiveness, How About Neither? at BSA here.
OP – Charles Bledsoe, Oct 9, 2025
Scroll to the bottom for Bledsoe’s simplified version of the “intricacies of Whitehead’s philosophical system”.
Charles Bledsoe – I was just reading a post by Manny5 titled Atonement or Forgiveness, and it provoked a critical bit of theological rumination that I thought I’d share in a separate thread, rather than hijacking his.
First off, I don’t like the whole idea of atonement, but I’m not a Paul blamer. I’m with Dr. Ehrman in thinking that Paul was a force for promoting the ideas we associate with him, not the originator of those ideas. I’m of the view that he took up and taught beliefs about Jesus and the atoning, soteriological significance of his death and resurrection that had already been hatched in the heads of early Christ-followers, and that were going to shape the Christian faith with or without Paul’s help.
Now then, as for the categories of forgiveness and atonement, my personal theology has no use for either. I would argue, as I’ve done elsewhere, that God’s nature being perfect and unconditional love obviates both forgiveness and atonement, removes the possibility or need for either.
That is, if God is absolute love then God is not characterized by, not capable of the kind of retributive anger attributed to him by the doctrine of atonement, and if God doesn’t feel retributive anger in the first place then God can’t very well stop feeling it. No retributory anger, no forgiveness. The dictionary defines “forgiveness” as ceasing to feel anger toward an offender. God has no wrathful anger to cease feeling, therefore it’s a theological mistake to think in terms of God forgiving our offenses.
And if God’s perfect love renders forgiveness an impossibility then it certainly does the same for substitutionary atonement, and cancels the notion that God requires a propitiatory sacrifice in order to offer us the possibility of salvation. In fact it cancels the whole Christian idea of salvation.
If God is without penal anger and was never going to condemn us to hell, if the fate that Christian salvation is supposed to spare us from doesn’t exist and was never in store for us, well, then the Christian idea of salvation is moot, nothing along the lines of it is a real possibility. A perfectly loving God simply loves us, without chastising judgement; a perfectly loving God doesn’t punitively will our damnation and then mercifully grant some of us a pardon.
From my theological perspective, both the belief of early Christians that they were under God’s retributive judgement and stood in need of divine forgiveness, and the belief that Jesus was God’s means of effecting an atonement for human sin that would make the bestowal of “His” forgiveness possible, set Christianity on an erring and tragic theological and historical trajectory of emulating a God who righteously inflicts suffering, and inadequately appreciating and striving to align with God’s love nature.
Michael Waddell
Yeah, the idea of God forgiving never fit well with my theology. But I think it’s healthy and useful to feel remorse, not just when you hurt someone specific, but when you do things you see as generally ‘wrong’, without a specific victim to apologize to. It makes sense to have some holistic sense of the community (God of my people) to apologize to. Or what of sins against yourself? I can see why a monotheistic culture would absorb the “God of rules” with the “God of love”, and come up with a “God of forgiveness” as a result.
If you don’t sin against God when you pollute, or freeload, or do something you promised you wouldn’t, how do you process feeling remorse and offering repentance?
Schaun Wheeler
Michael Waddell – I really like the way Danya Ruttenberg frames this in her book On Repentance and Repair, which is her basically giving a modern spin on Maimonides. She emphasizes that repentance isn’t primarily about feeling guilt before God; it’s about engaging with the people affected by our actions. To repent is to put yourself in a position where you have to see the world from their perspective, acknowledge the harm you caused, and actively bear responsibility for repairing it. Remorse, then, isn’t a self-directed feeling of shame — it’s a kind of moral attunement that motivates concrete repair and relational accountability. Repentance becomes a practice of empathy and communal responsibility, where the “work” is relational: making amends, restoring trust, and reorienting yourself in the network of obligations and care that surrounds you.
Which, in traditions of both Judaism and Christianity, aligns with the general idea of coming to “see others as God sees them” – cultivating an orientation toward other people that is aligned with the orientation that we suppose God has toward them.
Charles Bledsoe, Oct 9
Michael Waddell – My relational theology does conceive God to be thoroughly relational, and therefore affected by us and pained by our injurious and destructive choices, and on this view when we “sin” we indeed sin against God. However, from the perspective of a love-based theology God doesn’t process our sins as transgressions for which the appropriate and required response is punitive. Rather, the response inherent in a God whose ontologically fundamental mode of being is relationality and perfect love is to redemptively play off of our bad choices, to constructively interact with the situation they create, to bring out of it any good that’s possible, to continue lovingly seeking to move us toward our best existential possibilities and well-being.
My view isn’t that sin and evil don’t displease or faze God, and the displeasure that I envision God experiencing can even be considered anger. What I’m arguing is merely that God’s anger is never retributive, and, that being the case, it being the case that there’s no wrathfulness in God’s nature that God might choose mercy over the need for forgiveness is obviated. If love is God’s only option, and there’s no punitivity in God’s constitution, then there’s simply no possibility of forgiveness. God doesn’t love our sins, but God inherently always loves the sinner, and the question of forgiveness never arises. Of course many theists don’t like the idea that God’s innate disposition dictates God’s responses, it strikes them as limiting God’s freedom and power, but I have no problem with the idea of a limited, nonomnipotent God.
Charles Bledsoe
Michael Waddell – I should add to my previous reply that on the view expressed there our repentance should be directed to both the people we’ve injured and to God, it being the case that our sins also injure a relational God. And, what’s more, a loving God whose heart is geared to desiring and seeking the rehabilitation rather than the punishment of sinners desires our repentance because it makes us receptive to God’s redemptive efforts in our hearts and consciences.
Michael Waddell,
Very interesting. I’m going to prod a little here, not because I think you’re wrong, but because I’m not sure what I think yet and you seem a valuable dialectical sparring partner.
You’ve said that sin might hurt God or even anger God, but they do not give him the impulse to punish, since that’s not his nature. Okay, let’s assume that’s true. There are sins that hurt others, and sins that hurt myself, but I must assume there sins that only hurt God. For instance, let’s say a dying man hands me a sack of cash and makes me promise to give it to a charity I don’t particularly like. If I keep the money, one could argue I’m not hurting the man (who is dead) or the charity (which never received the money or the promise) or myself (if I prefer the money to a clean conscience). If, in this case, I’m hurting God, then this is kind of like the younger-second-cousin to atonement. God doesn’t exactly suffer to forgive my sins, but he suffers, and I face no consequences besides knowing of his suffering. Assuming I love God, I would want to avoid these actions. But if I don’t love God, what motivation do I have to behave morally?
Charles Bledsoe, Oct 9
Michael Waddell – Firstly, I agree that there are sins that only hurt God. I conceive God to be all about promoting the creativity of the rest of the universe, every creaturely entity’s actualization of its ideal self-creative and existential possibilities. When we make decisions to create our own lives that fall short of realizing the best possibilities of a human life that saddens and pains God. In such cases, cases where we only harm our own best interests and not the well-being of another human being, we still harm the happiness of, and sin against God.
Regarding the point you raise about our lacking motivation to behave morally if we don’t love God, well, yes, if one realizes that one has no need to fear punitive consequences from God; and if one doesn’t love, and doesn’t conceive God to be passible and therefore doesn’t have any care about hurting God then there are no theistic motives to refrain from making unethical choices.
But I would argue from my theological perspective that this doesn’t deprive God altogether of the ability to be a factor in our consciences, and of redemptive efficacy in our lives. God is still at work in our heads and hearts sharing God’s feelings about our poor decisions and bad actions, and God’s loving desire that we do better, that we realize better relational and existential possibilities—and God’s vision of those possibilities.
In my panentheistic theology the mechanism, so to speak, of this sharing and influence on our consciences and choices is simply our internal relatedness to God, God’s internal presence, and our feelings of God, whether we’re conscious that they’re feelings of God or not. God then doesn’t become impotent, without efficacy and influence in our lives because we don’t realize that our sins also adversely affect God’s happiness. God is still there, plugging away in our psyches to help us actualize our human potential for goodness and flourishing. But of course if one is aware of God’s capacity to be hurt by our actions and to take joy from our virtuous doings, the influence of this awareness on our choices and conduct of life can make God’s work easier.
Michael Waddell, Oct 9
Charles Bledsoe – That’s very good. This is compelling stuff. I still need to work through how it differs from “forgiveness after repentance” though. There still seems to be something there, in my mind. Not “I need God to forgive me so he doesn’t take vengeance”, but “I need there to be a difference between living in sin and deciding to live differently from here on”.
When one does something wrong, and knows it, and plans to continue doing wrong, and feels ashamed, this is uncomfortable and one seeks relief. There is a change that some people call “forgiveness” which feels like “Yes I did wrong, but now I will not, and my guilt is no longer a weight on me”. It’s not that God will only forgive you if you confess, show remorse, and repent; it’s that the process of being forgiven (the lifting of guilt) is enacted through those things. Does that sound right to you?
Charles Bledsoe, Oct 9
Michael Waddell – For a theist, repentance can still function as a guilt-relieving moral metanoia, turning point and course correction toward better ethical and existential choices without being linked with the concept of God’s forgiveness of sin. It can instead be understood as simply the regret, the remorseful recognition of wrongdoing and decision for change that’s necessary for us to get on the path to realizing God’s vision for our lives, and thereby giving joy to God. God remains a motivating factor in our repentance, as an object of our love whom we wish to make happy.
Charles Bledsoe, Oct 10
Schaun Wheeler – You nicely articulate here a relational and high philosophical conception of repentance that I very much resonate with.
Schaun Wheeler, Oct 9 ***
I like this, but I wonder if there’s a viable reconciliation of the classic atonement model and the view you’ve set out here.
Across a lot of traditions, there’s a shared intuition that the universe has a kind of underlying flow or order. When you live in harmony with it, things go well; when you fight against it, you suffer. It’s not punishment, it’s just how reality works. It’s the same as the difference with swimming with the current of a strong river vs. swimming against the current: the river isn’t punishing you; you’re just doing something hard and potentially dangerous. Taoists call it the Tao; in Hinduism it’s dharma; in Buddhism it’s dependent origination — the idea that everything arises through interlinked causes and conditions, so harmony means acting in tune with that causal flow rather than pushing against it.
The same idea crops up in the Hebrew wisdom tradition — the idea in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes that there’s an order built into creation, and that living in line with it (justice, humility, compassion) leads to shalom. When Jesus starts talking about being “not of this world” (kosmos – not to fall into an etymological fallacy (1), but the term originally meant “order” or “arrangement”), I think he’s tapping into that same intuition. When Jesus contrasts himself with “the world,” he’s contrasting the divine order with the human order that’s fallen out of alignment with it. If the order most people live by is out of step with God’s order, then Jesus is representing the “true” kosmos.
(1) – The etymological fallacy poses that a certain term’s original meaning applies to its colloquial and modern understanding in current circumstances.
From that perspective, atonement isn’t about God being angry and needing to be appeased. It’s more like we’ve all gotten ourselves caught in the undertow, and the natural consequence is that we’ll drown unless someone pulls us out. If God really is love, then it’s in God’s nature to reach into the current and bring us back into harmony. So both atonement and forgiveness can be seen as an act of rescuing us from the destructive consequences of our own misalignment. Forgiveness is the actual act of God’s volition, and atonement is the principle that the universe isn’t going to fish us out of that undertow itself – it requires an act from someone else who is capable of navigating the current.
And if God is love in an absolute sense, then that offer of rescue — of forgiveness via atonement — is made freely to everyone. The only “judgment” involved is whether we accept the hand that’s reaching out. That’s how Robert Farrar Capon conceptualizes grace: that in the end, the only question God asks is whether we’ll let ourselves be saved. The boat is there for everyone. The only way to be lost is to refuse to get in. Every other aspect of religious observance (repentance, obedience, etc.) isn’t so much payment for the ride – a method to appease God – as it is a show of gratitude for having already been pulled from the current.
So it’s possible to think of atonement as necessary, not because God’s angry, but because reality itself has an order, and love acts to restore us to it. And it’s freely given to everyone, because love can’t do otherwise.
Now, all of this possibly requires us to assume that there is an order that even God must conform to. I haven’t catalogued it explicitly, but it feels like that’s a somewhat foreign concept in most Christian traditions – the assumption in those traditions, I think, is that God and the Order are the same thing. But for any tradition or person willing to separate the two, I think it’s possible to reconcile the concepts of both atonement and forgiveness with the idea of a perfectly-loving God.
Charles Bledsoe, ***
Schaun Wheeler – The perspective you’ve articulated here very much aligns with, and is in fact a part of the metaphysical worldview that my brand of philosophical theology is embedded in. Thanks for sharing your reflections.
Charles Bledsoe
Derik Reed – The thrust of my spirituality is also cultivating a form of life oriented to what I understand to be the nature of reality, its creative, experiential, relational, teleological, axiologically purposive nature, its aim at what Hegel termed freedom, maximum conscious and relational creative self-determination; or what Whitehead termed intensity, maximum value experience.
My personal theology is rooted in this philosophical vision of reality, nature, and life, and conceives God to be the ultimate instance and embodiment of a creative-relational-values-driven world ontology, as well as an agential force for promoting it. It’s via this metaphysical perspective that I arrive at the view that God is all about nurturing our fullest and best fulfillment of our humanity, our best self-creative and existential possibilities, our optimal eudaimonic well-being. This inherent nurturing nature that knows no retributive anger, only the desire to salvage, to redeem whatever creative good can be redeemed from our destructive choices, is what I have in mind when I posit a love nature for God, when I envision God to be perfect and unconditionally agapeic relationality—and when I argue that the total and absolute lovingness that constitutes God’s being obviates the need for, and possibility of forgiveness and Christian atonement.
Manny5
Charles Bledsoe – Why do you need God?
Charles Bledsoe
Manny5 – Well, for me, for someone who subscribes to a Whiteheadian process theology, answering that question thoroughly would involve a long excursion into the intricacies of process metaphysics. I’ll spare you that and just say that the reasons are systematic, i.e., involved in those intricacies of Whitehead’s philosophical system that I’m mercifully refraining from doing a long-winded deep dive into.
But that sounds like a cop-out, so I’ll risk being too technical and also just briefly say that the answer largely has to do with what Whitehead calls the ontological principle, his metaphysical maxim that the reasons for things, or the possibilities that entities actualize, can’t just float around on their own, that they have to reside in something actual. Given this principle there’s arguably (I say “arguably” because not all process thinkers agree with Whitehead here) a need to locate the infinite grand gestalt of all of reality’s creative possibilities somewhere, and Whitehead calls that somewhere God’s “envisagement” of possibilities, or the “primordial nature of God”.
And there’s also a need to explain how what Whitehead terms “actual entities” get their initial bearings in a situation they’re otherwise thrown into cold. And how it’s possible for completely novel self-creative options not immediately suggested to them by their situation to occur to them seemingly out of nowhere. Whitehead’s explanation is that the source of novel possibilities is the above-mentioned envisagement of them by God, which actual entities have access to and internalize from God thanks to their internal relation to God.
But process philosophy isn’t monolithic. Not all adherents of process philosophy like these solutions of Whitehead’s, or even his inclusion of God in his system (something that also caused his philosophy to be blackballed by mainstream academic philosophy). There’s even a school of process philosophy called Whitehead without God. So if none of the above works for you you wouldn’t be alone, even among my fellow Whiteheadians. Personally, I find the systematic arguments of Whitehead’s philosophy for the existence of God cogent and compelling.
