S
Son_of_Jonah
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Greetings! Hopefully this is the right location for this question:
My wife and I read a book, 33 Days to Merciful Love, by Fr. Michael Gaitley, and listened to a Lighthouse CD featuring Fr. Chris Alar in the subject of Divine Mercy, and both priests said two things that confused us. If anyone has read/listened to these priests and is familiar with what I’m about to say, I’d love some help understanding them!
The first is that both priests often talk about Divine Mercy as though it were genuinely different from and even opposed to Divine Justice. They quote St. Therese and St. Faustina, the latter who quotes Jesus in her diary, where He talks about the door of justice and the door of mercy as two different things. I had always understood justice and mercy to be two sides to the same coin, two different ways of understanding the same thing, since God is indivisible, and His “attributes” are in actuality without distinction.
The second I find more difficult. They both speak of Christ’s passion and death as though it were necessary to pay the debt of justice owed by our sins, and they do so in terms that sound like penal substitution, which I know to be heresy. I had understood Christ’s passion as being most fitting, an act of perfect love, and that that was why He died, but that, strictly speaking, His death wasn’t necessary. Penal substitution makes His death necessary, which is how they explained it (Jesus is a victim to justice in our place).
I think most of what these priests write sounds really orthodox and solid, and I firmly believe that I must be missing something or failing to understand something here, because I don’t believe they are promoting actual heresy here. Can anyone help?
My wife and I read a book, 33 Days to Merciful Love, by Fr. Michael Gaitley, and listened to a Lighthouse CD featuring Fr. Chris Alar in the subject of Divine Mercy, and both priests said two things that confused us. If anyone has read/listened to these priests and is familiar with what I’m about to say, I’d love some help understanding them!
The first is that both priests often talk about Divine Mercy as though it were genuinely different from and even opposed to Divine Justice. They quote St. Therese and St. Faustina, the latter who quotes Jesus in her diary, where He talks about the door of justice and the door of mercy as two different things. I had always understood justice and mercy to be two sides to the same coin, two different ways of understanding the same thing, since God is indivisible, and His “attributes” are in actuality without distinction.
The second I find more difficult. They both speak of Christ’s passion and death as though it were necessary to pay the debt of justice owed by our sins, and they do so in terms that sound like penal substitution, which I know to be heresy. I had understood Christ’s passion as being most fitting, an act of perfect love, and that that was why He died, but that, strictly speaking, His death wasn’t necessary. Penal substitution makes His death necessary, which is how they explained it (Jesus is a victim to justice in our place).
I think most of what these priests write sounds really orthodox and solid, and I firmly believe that I must be missing something or failing to understand something here, because I don’t believe they are promoting actual heresy here. Can anyone help?