• Summary: Is God 100% good? How does Jesus solve the problem of human evil, within human nature? We examine how the loving God heals human evil in us, in a loving way: by becoming one of us as Jesus of Nazareth, retelling our stories, fixing our story and our human nature, and sharing his victory with us by his Spirit.  Jesus calls us to participate in what he is doing, both in us and in the world.

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• Summary: God is not blood thirsty. He is a blood donor. We take a close look at the Jewish sacrificial system on three levels. On the level of the Pentateuch's narrative, God was retelling the story of Moses ascending Mount Sinai. On the level of the annual calendar practice, God was renewing the covenant by both sending sin away from Israel and consuming it Himself. On the level of the sin offering, God was cutting and burning away the organs of waste and toxins, showing His wrath is directed at the corruption of sin, not our personhood.  Meanwhile, God gave back the uncorrupted life (blood) of the animal to cleanse and restore.

  Advocates of penal substitutionary atonement claim that the Jewish sacrificial system represents a lawcourt of some sort. We demonstrate that it represents a medical and surgical procedure instead: God was acting like a modern dialysis machine, taking Israel's impurity and giving back purity. Therefore, the Jewish sacrificial system does not support penal substitutionary atonement. It supports medical substitutionary atonement. 

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• Summary: We examine four meanings of the word "justice": meritocratic-retributive, distributive, libertarian and restorative.   Secular thought cannot organize these four principles, leading to stalemates.  However, God organizes these four principles: (1) restorative; (2) distributive; (3) meritocratic-retributive; (4) libertarian.

  In relation to sin, God's justice is restorative.  We carefully examine the phrase "an eye for an eye" and also various actions of God in the Old Testament.  

  In a technical sense, "retributive justice" is the principle of karma:  An offender suffers harm in proportion to the harm s/he inflicted.  Penal substitutionary atonement rests on the notion that God's justice is "retributive justice" in this technical karmic sense, taken to infinity.  "Restorative justice" is the principle of repentance and restoration:  An offender must acknowledge harm done to the victim and participate appropriately in the restoration of that harm.   Medical substitutionary atonement rests on the notion that God's justice is "restorative justice," where we must participate in Christ in the healing of our human nature and relationships.

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• Summary: How might Christians engage meaningfully in public policy?  We apply a Christian restorative justice vision to policies in criminal justice, housing, and environment/health, especially because American policies are shaped by Protestant heresies.  In criminal justice, we consider how to call offenders to help restore the harm they did, rather than only inflict proportional suffering on them.  In housing, we could understand housing policy as part of coherent labor and education policies, and resist Calvin's endorsement of interest rate lending, Locke's endorsement of colonialism through meritocratic production, and the Puritan notion of racial segregation.  In environment/health policy, we reconsider limited liability and the notion that corporations can generate "externalities" to make people and land pay the true cost of their actions.

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• Summary: We explore how medical substitutionary atonement interacts with a few major considerations in trauma counseling. We consider how, in penal substitution, imputation of innocence does not address shame, the desire to hide the self, and a person’s self concept. In medical substitution, by contrast, there is a strong sense of the person being made in the image of God (imago dei) and longing for God’s goodness, love, belonging, justice, beauty, and order. The corruption of sin via the fall is serious but not the starting point for understanding who we are. Also, the emotional motivations available to the person and called for from the person have to do with hope and healing for one’s self, rather than a cycle of insecure attachment anxiety with God, fear of retribution, guilt, relief, and debt-obligation.

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• Summary: What motivation do we have to follow Jesus and obey him? What motivations do we cultivate in others? We explore the language of participation - we participate in the Son’s relationship to the Father by the Spirit. In the paradigm of healing atonement, more motivations open up to us because Jesus engages the depth of our human longing for intimacy and partnership.

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• Summary: We long to live in happy ending stories. It should not surprise us that the Bible was the world’s first happy ending story. We look at a few happy ending stories in some detail to highlight a yearning that our culture has: to live in a coherent story where good triumphs over evil; to participate in that story, even at some cost to ourselves; and to nuance the classical story of the hero so that we as human beings are sometimes the villains, or tragic heroes, and the good Creator God found in Jesus is the true hero.

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• Summary: On the cross, Jesus quoted Psalm 22:1, “My God, my God, why have you forsake me?” This “cry of dereliction” has long puzzled Christians. Advocates of penal substitutionary atonement claim that God the Father turned against or away from the Son in some real sense. But not only does this violate various Scriptures and theological convictions about the Father-Son union flowing from the Nicene Creed, there is a much better explanation, rooted in the pattern of Jesus retelling David’s story. Medical substitution stresses the active, not passive, obedience of Jesus, and God’s faithfulness to restore that which was broken, lost, and incomplete.

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• Summary: How do we set up rhythms of life and worship that remind us and take us deeper into Jesus’ healing atonement and God’s restorative justice? This was an introduction and workshop-style discussion.

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