What is "retributive"

Usage examples of "retributive".

To argue that because earthly rulers, in their anger and power, send retributive armies against their rebellious subjects, to bring them to judgment, destroy their homes and cities, and lay waste their lands with fire and sword, therefore God, the supreme King, will do so by the whole world, is not to reason logically, but to poetize creatively.

There are in some quarters faint traces of a single purgatorial or retributive conception.

The conviction that there is a retributive life hereafter is the moral cement of the social fabric.

This idea of the banishment or admission of souls, according to their deserts, or according to an elective grace, into an anchored location called hell or heaven, a retributive or rewarding residence for eternity, we shall pass by with few words, because it recurs for fuller examination in other chapters.

Without the idea of a Satan there would be no idea of a retributive banishment of souls into hell, and of course no occasion for a vindicating restoration of them thence to their former or a superior state.

ON the one extreme, a large majority of Christian scholars have asserted that the doctrine of a retributive immortality is clearly taught throughout the Old Testament.

The various passages yet unnoticed which purport to have been uttered by Jehovah or at his command, and which are urged to show that the reality of a retributive life after death is a revealed doctrine of the Old Testament, will be found, upon critical examination, either to owe their entire relevant force to mistranslation, or to be fairly refuted by the reasonings already advanced.

That the Hebrews, during the time covered by their sacred records, had no conception of a retributive life beyond the present, knew nothing of a blessed immortality, is shown by two conclusive arguments, in addition to the positive demonstration afforded by the views which, as we have seen, they did actually hold in regard to the future lot of man.

And in the present case the fundamental thought is that of repeated births of the soul, each birth trailing retributive effects from the foregone.

The instinctive shrinking from death felt by man would, sooner or later, quite naturally suggest the idea that death was not an original feature in the divine plan of the world, but a retributive additional discord.

The Calvinistic dogma makes it denote the satisfaction of the law of retributive justice by a substitutional anguish.

The writer evidently exults in the thought that, at the second coming of Christ, death shall lose its retributive character and the under world be baffled of its expected prisoners, because the living shall instantly experience the change of bodies fitting them to ascend to heaven with the returning and triumphant Lord.

In other terms, as the recognition of the retributive law of God through rebellion and guilt filled the consciences of men with wretchedness, so the acceptance of the pardoning love of God through faith and conformity will fill them with blessedness.

The tremendous fact that all the inwrought elements and workings of our being are self retributive, their own exceeding great and sufficient good or evil, independent of external circumstances and sequences, is rarely appreciated.

When the disembodied soul had endured a sufficient quantity of retributive and purifying pain, it was loosed, and sent on earth in a new body.