Evangelical Protestant Soterology

American Evangelicalism, and to an extent Protestantism as a whole, has gotten it into their heads that being Saved is synonymous with not being punished for your sins.

That's why they can't accept the multiple Scriptural witnesses about God's Punishments being for Correction, or YHWH promising Israel He will Save them AFTER He Punishes them.

The reason they can't even entertain any alternative theory of Atonement to Penal Substation is because to them Penal Substitution is what the word Atonement itself means.  But the truth is in Ancient Israel the idea behind making a Sin Offering or Trespass Offering was never that you aren't being punished because the Goat is being punished in your place, the idea was losing this Goat, or the money you had to spend to obtain it, was your punishment.  It was essentially a ritually glorified way of paying a Fine.

Salvation is about not being punished for our sins in a sense, in the sense that the original required punishment for eating the fruit was death, and likewise the Torah throwing around the Death Penalty pretty liberally.  Because of Jesus's Death and Resurrection we are all saved from that maximum sentence.

But that's another thing, even though these Evangelicals will quote verses about "the wages of sin is death", they don't' actually believe that, they think the modern concept of "Hell" is what "death" actually means when Paul says that.

Now you can be forgiven for your Sins, as Ezekiel 18 lays out forgiveness is a result of Repentance.

I was accused recently of "denying repentance" because of my current Soterology.  But the truth is it was before I believed in Universal Salvation, or at least while I was still transitioning into it, that I made posts on this blog agaisnt repentance.  Where I argued you did not need to make a serious attempt to change your ways for God to forgive you.

That's why I find it really offensive when Evangelicals accuse advocates of my Soteorlogy of denying that actions have consequences when they are the ones who think the point of believing in Jesus is a Get Out of Hell Free Card.

I believe that unrepentant sinners will be punished.  But I also see more then one passage in The Bible that implies Believers will be punished more then Unbelievers (like Luke 12 and Ezekiel 16), because we're without excuse, we can't claim we didn't know what the rules were.

Now some particularly Eternal Security believing Evangelicals do have some nuance on this issue.  Kent Hovind I believe once said that Sin is a "legal matter" if your an unbeliever but a "Family Matter" if your a believer.  Because they feel God only considers believers His Children.

But Paul said at the Sermon on Mars Hill in Acts 17 that all Human beings are Offspring of God. 

Meanwhile how can Sin ONLY be a Legal Matter for exactly the people who never consented to this Law Code in the first place?  Certain American Christians keep saying "consent of the governed" is a Christian Principal yet they don't actually think God operates that way.