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The cross is meaningless to those who are perishing. Christ crucified is a stumbling block for Jews and foolishness to Gentiles but to us who are being saved it’s the power and wisdom of God seen in Jesus Christ. In this manner of redeeming us God’s foolishness proves wiser and His weakness stronger than we can conceive. I began in faith simply knowing God gave Jesus for me and that believing I would experience His life.
However as time moved on there was an underlying disturbance in my soul over the explanation I was receiving of how Christ was given for me. The picture emerged gradually that Jesus agonising death on the cross was in order for God the Father to punish Him for my sins so that I could be released from the punishment I deserved.
Love for Christ was the response whenever I considered His suffering, but accompanied with that unease. How could this work, conscious doubt was notpossible, the concept of Christ dying for this purpose was so pervasive in the church I dare not question it. The explanations that the cross satisfied Gods demand for justice and exhausted His wrath against sin by inflicting it on Jesus only made things worse. What sort of justice is this that kills the innocent in order to let the guilty go free? Is God schizophrenic, needing to vent his anger before He can offer His forgiveness? Is the Father actually forgiving if the Son is paying the debt? The explanation was totally unsatisfying butwas not to be considered.
When we live with un-answered questions they can have a corrosive effect on faith. Fortunately I knew enough of Christ for the cross to act as a magnet of love towards Him despite the year’s long, un-voiced question over what I was obliged to believe in order to hold onto Him. I was unaware of other explanations of how the cross might work but the power of it still drew me to Him. I was not equipped to consider the dilemma between my feelings and intellectual dissatisfaction with the explanations, so the matter lay dormant. I did not know that the explanation I had received had a name ‘Penal Substitutionary Theory of the Atonement’ (PST) or that it was rather poorly represented and just one theory amongst several. My dilemma came to a joyful end as I encountered other explanations of the cross and learned that many claimed that PTS was not heard of before the fifteenth centuryand others advised to treat it carefully.
This was good news for me, it actually was Gospel! I began to study and consider other views and the theories of ‘ransom’, ‘recapitulation’, satisfaction’, ‘moral influence’, ‘government and Christus Victor. Once the field opened up I was free to think my suppressed thought of PTS as it was often spoken of, it seemed completely repugnant and intellectually bankrupt. One recent Baptists writer caused a stir in amongst British evangelical by quoting in reference to PST, when presented as the Father’s punishment of the Son that it was like “cosmic child abuse” and I found myself in agreement.
I now consider such views an obstacle to faith for many non-Christians and particularly so in confronting Islam, that questions “Why cannot God just forgive”. The question of the atonement is tied closely to that of the Trinity as it required the incarnation and the sacrifice of the God-man. If this can be clarified for Moslems we may make headway on the Trinity.
Several atonement theories are fully compatible with one another and may be combined along with insights of other theories. Let us consider Paul’s Words: – “The cross is foolishness to the Gentiles”. If we start with Paul’s perspective in our evangelism that the cross appears foolish when misunderstood or if misrepresented, perhaps we (I particularly refer to evangelicals whose practice I know best) may do a better job in disclosing the meaning of the cross. I feel our failure to do so is part of the reason we are losing ground and that this is one element that we need to address in order to meet with greater success in the evangelism of our societies. This post is presents from a subjective point of view in order to illustrate the personal effects of atonement theory and how a simplistic ‘one brush fits all’ approach may also be unsatisfactory for many we seek to witness to. An overview of each theory and its history can easily be achieved by other means.
That which satisfies me and which I would use as appropriate in evangelism is the Christus Victor, Recapitulation and Moral Influence Theories with insights from others. My hope is that the post will prompt consideration and discussion producing more light than steam.
Perhaps I might initiate discussion in two ways. You could indicate which theories you find most satisfactory and why, and which if any cause concern.
Jesus said He came to give His life as a ransom to many, giving rise to the ‘ransom theory’ popular in the early church and supported by a number of Fathers until Anselm’s satisfaction theory became more popular. How do you understand the‘ransom’ Jesus spoke of? Who was the ‘ransom’ paid to if indeed to any?
All Along the Watchtower 
A very interesting post, Rob, and a very honest one. As you dsay, it can be difficult to question PST, or even just the way it is presented, without drawing attack from some quarters.
As you say, there are multiple perspectives on the cross that can be complementary to each other, and the context of speaking and thinking draws different ones to the fore. Hebrews is a good place for understanding the cross.
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“Why cannot God just forgive”.
I guess my answer would be, He could . . . but it does not show us very much of His love for us or of the love we should have for Him and for each other.
For a billionaire to take a penny from his pocket and place it in the hand of a beggar is of no concern to the billionaire; he will not miss it and he will not express his love for the individual . . . it is but an uncaring and almost unconscious act.
To become another beggar and give beggars all that you have (even your life) is an act of sacrificial love and has immense concern and love embodied in the action. It is the love we are familiar with inside a healthy family: a mother or father giving their life for their child.
And for our part, the lesson has been given: to give to God and to one another until it hurts, despite the suffering, and regardless of the cost.
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Good post, Rob and thanks. Irenaeus saw the Incarnation and Resurrection through the lens of what St Paul says about recapitulation – on one man all fell, in one man, all rise. If there were no penalty attached to the fall, then our natures would not have been marred by it, and the image of God that is in us would shine forth clearly.
If there is nothing we can do of our own will to deserve salvation – which is restoration to what God intended with our first parents, there is, likewise, nothing we can do to clean away the dirt from the image of God in who, we are made. The Jews thought that strict adherence to the Law would do it; Jesus tells us otherwise.
St Isaac answered the question you pose thusly. Yes, God could have chosen other ways to save us, but no way other than this one would have sufficed to show the depth and the breadth of his love. As we are told in Scripture, one might choose, if one were a righteous man, to die for another righteous man, but none of us has the depth of love necessary to die to save a sinner. God, and God alone possesses that love, and it was to demonstrate it that he chose this method.
I’ve deliberately avoided the usual categories Western theology has attached to theories of the atonement in order to use Eastern explanations.
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It seems to me also that language is an issue here. If we want to look at the propitiation/penal substitution side of things by examining the Torah and the Torah’s interpretation in, say, Hebrews, then we come across these words: caphar (Heb.); exilaskomai (Gk.); capporeth (Heb.); hilasterion (Gk.). The idea in the Hebrew is very much to do with covering or blotting out sin. In Greek the emphasis seems to be on relationship: the hil- root for propitiation seems originally to be connected with being happy or being merciful. The idea here seems to be that good relations are restored by the sacrifice – thus at-one-ment (which I think was coined by Wycliffe in his translation) – we are made one with God again by the sacrifice. Hence Paul’s words in Colossians about Christ making peace between us and God through the blood of His cross.
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Yes, certainly from the Jewish standpoint the sacrifice was always essential – hence Christ as the spotless lamb, of course.
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Exactly. Personally, although penal substitution raises some issues, I’d feel uncomfortable throwing it out. I think that would take the wind out of a lot of Romans.
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Me too. I’m not convinced by the idea that the devil has rights which demand satisfaction. Mankind’s redemption surely means a restoration to the life lost by Adam and involves the redemption of our nature. If Christ was not man, that could not have been achieved. But since none but God could achieve it for us, Christ also has to be God. This is why for St Cyril and for the Cappadocians, the question of Christ’s natures was crucial.
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Yes, I mentioned that in my sermon on Sunday which was on the creation of man. I basically said that what the First Man lost, the Last Man won by His work on the cross. The Incarnation is what also qualifies Christ to be the judge of mankind on the Last Day. I love Orthodox emphasis on the Incarnation – it goes so very well with the Atonement and the Revelation.
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Good – and btw, on the subject of your last post, if you saw Francis Phillips’ comment, you might be interested in this link:
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2015/06/01/one-womans-vocation-to-build-a-civilisation-of-love/
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Thanks for the link. Please pray for my first counselling session tomorrow. I don’t know exactly what I will discuss because there are a range of issues, but I’ve decided to bring with me my notes from my Wycliffe interviews in February.
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I shall – and let it come as it comes – that’s usually best in counselling 🙂
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Nicholas, I assume you’re the one doing the counseling. Is this Pastoral i.e. scriptural together with psychological or what?
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I’m receiving the counselling to discuss some childhood issues and other things.
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You might like to find out, what the particular process is the that counselor follows and how long the sessions might go on for. If he’s totally opened about the amount of time, then I would seek a second opinion.
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My counseling sessions are 2 hr. as less than that is short-changing both the client and me. I find that 10 sessions are enough. If they have to go longer the trouble is with me not the client.
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An excellent article, I think. But Francis Phillips article’s always are. I have learned much from her articles and from her occasional comments here, which is how I first became aware of her.
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I have been told that the word atonement means to cover and remove as if a cloth was placed over a mess absorbed and removed it rather than simply covering it. So perhaps blotting up rather than blotting out.
Perhaps someone here would know whether this is so, can you comment on this.
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Sin exacts a price on the individual which must be paid. But that is not the end of it. The sin is the symptom of another defect which needs be healed or we will constantly sin and constantly have the ‘debt’ of sin on our soul. It seems, simply put, that it is a lack of, or disordered form of love that is at the root of sin. Obedience, given freely in love, to the good and to the Creator and to all He loves and wills is absent or not perfected in the heart of the sinner. The trick is to fall madly in love with God and to suffer great distress for the even slightest imperfection in our love for Him and for our reluctance to do His Will. Christ loved us through great suffering and to His death; can we not do the same?
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At some point I stopped seeing the Cross in that way (although I never heard of the “PST” until today). I stopped seeing the Cross as a sign of how sinful I am (which cannot be denied) but instead began to see how Jesus willingly and lovingly enters into ALL human sin and suffering, “even unto death on a cross.” This was freeing for me. I could then look at the Cross and see Love rather than my own sin and shame. I think many modern folks reject the cross because they think that God is guilt-tripping them! Instead, he is showing us how he entered FULLY into our lives. We once were in paradise and then were banished. God seemed to be on the outside, we in our misery on the inside. Now, after the death of Christ on Cross, God has willingly and freely entered into our misery with us. Then, of course, the flip side is that we are then able to enter into his resurrection and glory but that starts getting into theological realms that are beyond my ability to write about so I will stop now. (The point being he enters into our earthly misery so that we may enter into his heavenly joy, its an exchange of love….ok, over my head!)
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“Who was the ‘ransom’ paid to if indeed to any?”
St Gregory the Theologian (Gregory Nazianzen) answers as follows:
“Now we are to examine another fact and dogma, neglected by most people, but in my judgment well worth enquiring into. To Whom was that Blood offered that was shed for us, and why was it shed? I mean the precious and famous Blood of our God and Highpriest and Sacrifice. We were detained in bondage by the Evil One, sold under sin, and receiving pleasure in exchange for wickedness. Now, since a ransom belongs only to him who holds in bondage, I ask to whom was this offered, and for what cause? If to the Evil One, fie upon the outrage! If the robber receives ransom, not only from God, but a ransom which consists of God Himself, and has such an illustrious payment for his tyranny, a payment for whose sake it would have been right for him to have left us alone altogether. But if to the Father, I ask first, how? For it was not by Him that we were being oppressed; and next, On what principle did the Blood of His Only begotten Son delight the Father, Who would not receive even Isaac, when he was being offered by his Father, but changed the sacrifice, putting a ram in the place of the human victim? Is it not evident that the Father accepts Him, but neither asked for Him nor demanded Him; but on account of the Incarnation, and because Humanity must be sanctified by the Humanity of God, that He might deliver us Himself, and overcome the tyrant, and draw us to Himself by the mediation of His Son, Who also arranged this to the honour of the Father, Whom it is manifest that He obeys in all things? So much we have said of Christ; the greater part of what we might say shall be reverenced with silence.”
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Who pays who in the Atonement?
Thank you Mark I have read that quote previously. There’s much sense and reverence in it addressing a question that the church has enquired into with some early opinion that the ransom was paid to the devil. With others that it was paid to God whether as a payment in satisfaction of God’s honour, Justice or Law.
Scripture is clear about the enormity of the payment and who made it but not to whom it was paid. My thoughts are that this being so to whom payment was made is not part of the story.
Shortly after sending the post off to Chalcedon I had a valuable conversation with one of my son’s friends, a university student, who was visiting. He began the conversation with a few questions about the challenge Charli game craze here. So at an appropriate point in the conversation I asked him if had heard from Christians that Christ died to pay for his sins. He said that he had, so I asked who he thought actually got paid sensibly he said nobody.
It seems that many theologians were unable to come up with that simple answer. To draw out the implications of what He had said I posed a certain situation.
“Suppose when you were here you started a fight with my son and did a lot damage and after you said you were sorry and would try to behave in future, I forgave you?”
Who would be paying for your forgiveness and who would get paid for forgiving you?
He got the point nobody would be getting paid even though I would have to pay.
I went onto explain that the payment I made would not just be the material cost but the emotional expenditure on my part to deal inwardly with what he had done, to come to terms with it and be able to treat him as a friend on future visits.
That is what God did He paid the price of our sin and dealt with forgiving it within His own being and the cross reveals the great cost of what transpired.
Whenever anybody forgives it involves a cost to themselves and the greater the offence the greater the cost – so it is with God.
The cross then reveals the enormity of the sin, the forgiveness and the exceeding love of God in one act.
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Many thanks for your thought-provoking reply, Rob. You’ve given me a lot to ponder….
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Rob, I think you are on to something here. When I was thinking about your question earlier today, I decided that it would be impossible for God to pay Satan, for God to owe Satan in any way. God paid the price himself to himself, which is an odd way of putting it so I think you expressed it better than I can. Also, it causes me to wonder what Jesus did when he “descended into hell”, he didn’t go there to pay Satan, and anyway, Satan would be displeased with any payment because he wants our souls rather than anything God could give him. He had already rejected anything and everything that God had to offer him. I think Jesus went into hell because his redemptive act extended as far as our sin could go, and that meant as low as hell itself, if that makes sense.
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Creeds are very good summaries of truth however “descended into hell”, but they do not tell the whole story, I believe it is in Perter we are told the reason for Christ decent into hell was that He preached to the spirits in prison.
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Thanks Rob, good point. 1 Peter 3:19 might make a good topic for another day.
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1 Pt. 3:19-20, That is a bit of a difficult one to deal with I’ll give you an outline why:
Preached to the spirits i.e. those who did not obey in the days of Noah.
What did He preach either a, b, c, or something else?
a. The gospel giving those who had not heard of Christ a second chance?
b. Judgement –i.e. your lost?
c. He declared His victory to over sin, death and hell and left that place?
Who was he preaching to either a. or b?
a. To human spirits of the people who lived in Noah’s time?
b. To demon spirits from that time about His victory and their defeat?
a. Has a problem as in the OT we are told that upon death the Spirit returns to God Who gave it so are the spirits of men enslaved in hell, if its people should it refer to souls. I do not know I will look up commentaries on this and give you an update if I get any light – at the moment I have no clue!
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QV said:
“In some sense the Devil has rights over those in sin;”
I know what you mean I would just suggest that any reference to the devil’s ‘right’ can become a slippery slope like it was to some who proposed the ‘ransom’ was paid to him. He can have no ‘rights’ over anybody in a moral sense as what he has over them he gained immorally being ‘a liar from the beginning’. What he has over the sinner is ‘power’ and that is what Jesus came to deliver us from.
As I see it, he cross revealed the lie about the nature of God that Satan bases his first temptation on and showed the liar for what he was.
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I think that is only the case if you hold to the theory that God has two wills and not that “It is not God’s will that any should perish but that all should come to a knowledge of the truth”.
But I am not familiar with all the explanations that others hold about the will of God.
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I think we can only speak of God permitting some things e.g. ‘the fall’ as it being a necessary possible consequence of the creation of beings with free will, which itself is necessary for beings to be capable of love.
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I do not care much for the philosophical concepts like omnipotent in defining God. I prefer the Biblical revelation Almighty. If we go by strict definitions of the words they do not entirely overlap, but I agree in principle God’s ultimate purpose cannot be thwarted.
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What is the greater good of eternal perdition?
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Just? Infinite punishment for finite sin is justice? How do you reconcile that understanding with Pauline theology and God’s unconditional love?
That is a confused understanding of free will. Is God the Good Itself?
In my mind, the natural will can only will God and the gnomic will is free precisely to the degree in which it is in harmony with the natural will.
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But inserting eternal perdition into Pauline theology makes it incoherent as such.
That is an logically confused model of freedom. What I am saying is that we cannot turn away from God. He is the ground and end of all desire and knowledge, the Good itself. Evil is not an end, it can only be chosen in ignorance, and as such it cannot be a purely free act. Freedom is at its most free, so to speak, when it is rescued from ignorance and the rational will can see the Good for what it is.
In other words, if a mentally ill man wanted to jump off of a bridge, you would not be obstructing his freedom by stopping him. You would be saving him from his illness.
Gnomic will is the intentional will, the deliberative will.
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I am merely reiterating the opinion of the saints and ancient theologians on this question–Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, Augustine, Maximus, Issac of Ninevah, etc.
We have free will and choices have consequences.
That is, you can choose what is conventionally evil or what have you, and for that you will suffer the consequences of that choice. However, you can only choose that evil if you think it is a good in some way, which is ignorance, for evil is not an end. Our wills are directed necessarily intentionally towards an end, even when this is not clearly understood, and seeing as God is the final cause of all movements of the will, no choice of evil can be free.
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I can’t read Latin and I have not read the word in any English Bible – You will have to explain a bit for me.
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But surly strictly defined omnipotence means more that, even as omnivorous means will eat anything omnipotent does not limit God within the confines of His own nature but applies to all power in all respects for either good or evil, as we know is not the case with God.
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Ok that is a reasonable explanation I had tended to think of omnipotent as Allah is defined in the Quran in which his power extends to doing whatever he fancies includes deception and leading some astray.
Our image of God was the same our definition of words different.
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Yes, God is the Good itself.
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Some of my thoughts on the sacrifice of the cross.
The cross was a sacrifice and sacrifice is at the heart of any act of forgiving. The one forgiving sacrifices:-
– Their right to recompense
– Apparently as others may see it their dignity e.g. living with a spouse that has been unfaithful
– Their right to justice and
– Their experience of righteous anger must be resolved within themselves
– Can you think of other aspects of the rights surrendered when forgiving
Sin has always been expensive for God. We can hear it in His voice as He searches for His lost Adam in the garden “Adam where are you”. Imagine how you would feel missing your son in seedy downtown shopping centre in your city.
Love involves a sacrifice of your own peace in all these situations. Those who accept a philosophical view of a god untouched by the suffering of His creation will deny this has anything to do with the sacrifice of Christ but I cannot really swallow that such a picture fits the God of Calvary.
What if your son turned into a drug addict, thief or murderer the turmoil and concern for him and the others he harms, while you know what he could have made of himself. It’s a great sacrifice keeping your heart open, hoping and loving.
Jesus was the lamb slain before the foundation of the world. There has always been a cross in the heart of God and since man’s first sin God has been making a cruciform sacrifice.
The cross at Calvary displayed in history the cost He has continually been paying. The cros multiplied the cost exponentially for God made Himself vulnerable and put Himself in the hands of His wayward creation knowing the total abuse they would subject Him to. At the cross what God predetermined became actual and from the cross He forgave the worst that His own could do to Him.
Through the cross He revealed the sinfulness of sin, the love of His creation love, the extent of His mercy and His divine glory in one act. In so doing God’s strength was demonstrated in His weakness and His wisdom by what seems foolish.
The ‘moral influence’ of the cross has drawn countless souls to Christ who cannot articulate a theory about it. The ‘sacrifice’ of the cross reveals His love and mercy as nothing else could.
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This, Rob, gets us closer to the insights of St Isaac and other Eastern Fathers. For various reasons, Western theology, which has an under-developed pneumatology, has tended to think in terms of ransom and human justice, not least because our limitations mean we think in concepts we understand. But we have to remember that God’s thoughts are as high above ours as we can imagine. Paul is right, not one of us would, in love, sacrifice our only-begotten son for a sinner – and most wouldn’t do it for anything. That means we have to elevate our thoughts in the direction of what it can mean to say ‘God is love’. Here, for me, we get better answers via the apophatic method: love is not grudging; it does not demand a price; it does not demand love back; it is not given on conditions we cannot meet; it is not given only after we have given love first. Now to our ways of thinking, this is, I think, mind-blowing, because in our daily lives, love is often accompanied by such caveats. Only in the love of a father (and mother) for a child do we see, from time to time, the kind of love I have just described – and it is, therefore, no accident, that Jesus tells us to call God ‘Father’ and tells us we are his adopted children. That gives us some dim insight, from our own experience, of what it means to call God ‘love’. How inadequately we respond to that if we begin to tie it down with the sort of restrictions we put on love. I have known parents cut off contact with their children over some problem and insist on conditions. We, too often, think of God in that way. We thereby cut ourselves off from the reality of a love so profound it will forgive us all our sins – if we but repent and confess Christ.
Well, that’s my two’pennyworth!
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Chalcedon you will probably appreciate this story:
Steve Chalk the Baptist pastor who drew so much criticism a while back in the UK for quoting the reference to ‘cosmic child abuse’ shared something of his thought and experience at a conference I attended about that time.
First he told of a Sunday school illustration he was told as a boy to illustrate Gods holiness. The teacher held a tissue in one hand and a lighted match in the other and brought them closer and closer together until the paper burst into flame – I think it was poetic (or evangelistic) licence that was then added for effect about the near disaster that resulted.
The teacher continued: the lesson you see kids is that God is so holy and we are so sinful. We cannot come into His presence if we did we would be entirely burnt up! God has told us that no one can even see His face and live.
Steve then told of His experience visiting a place of great poverty and suffering, he was quite moved and emotional remembering it. He recounted that coming away he felt he did not want to live any longer having experienced such pain. Thinking back to that childhood image of God, he thought rather, we would not be able to look on the face of God and live to endure the pain we would see there.
I think Steve this reveals himself to be a caring and sensitive person. Through such emotions sourced in the image of God that we retain we gain a glimpse of what the cross meant for God. So often we only consider the suffering of Christ but what of the suffering of the Father. I know that if my son were about to suffer some awful fate I would rather it be me.
God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.
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It sounds like I had the rare privilege of becoming Christian into a church with multiple models of the atonement, so I appreciate most of them in one way or another, but regard them all as incomplete. We must remember, I think, that they are metaphors designed to evoke in us some sense of mysteries far beyond us (what might be described, in Narnian terms, as “magic deeper still” from “the darkness before Time dawned”), and they are all compatible as long as none is held to be the complete and exclusive definition. Most of them build off of one scriptural passage or several. I particularly enjoy Christus Victor (1 Cor 15:25-26, 54; and it’s one way of understanding Acts 2:24).
As to the question of who receives the ransom payment, I think the answer has to be death, in Christ’s death on the cross. For the ransom frees those who were enslaved, and humanity was enslaved from death. Others have objected to the ransom theory because the payment seems to be recovered after the transaction, calling into question the legitimacy of the deal. I think it may have been Irenaeus who referred to Christ’s death therefore as a baited hook to capture death. The ransom theory has useful components, though emotionally it has never gripped me.
But I think you need elements of most of them to have a well-balanced diet, and I would include the Penal Substitution theory in that balance. I don’t know of any other atonement theory that links Christ’s death with our justification, as Paul clearly and repeatedly does (e.g. Romans 5:9, right after the main verse Abelard liked for his Moral Influence theory). More than most of the others, Penal Substitution gets at God’s holiness. The answer to the question, “Why can’t God just forgive?” is that such indulgence would make God unjust. God cannot tolerate or indulge sin. One might ask why God can’t destroy the sin rather than the sinner. The answer might be that the sin itself has no independent existence (an Augustinian answer); sin is not a thing, such that it can be destroyed. But the more important issue is that God cannot change his own character (if so, then he would cease to be God), and his character is perfect holiness (it is also perfect love, etc.). This is how I have heard Romans 3:25-26 interpreted, where Christ’s atonement demonstrates God’s righteousness in spite of God overlooking previously committed sins, the concern being to show that forgiveness is consistent with God being just. Otherwise, Paul seems to suggest in the latter verse, declaring the guilty to be innocent is simply a lie. With Christ’s voluntary death, God has an excuse for indulgence.
Some people object that PST does not absolve God of the lie of declaring the guilty to be innocent, but to call it “cosmic child abuse” is a stupid and uncharitable interpretation of the doctrine. Child abuse is by definition involuntary, yet Christ chose to die (John 10:18; Hebr 12:2). Calling the doctrine child abuse misunderstands the doctrine and sins against the command to love our fellow Christians. Such accusations should not be used against any belief, even wrong beliefs, long held by many great saints, unless they can be shown to be tantamount to idolatry.
But without PST, how do you interpret the following verses? (I’m not saying you can’t; I presume one can, since enough people have gotten worked up against PST while still loving their Bibles that they surely must have come up with ways to explain these. But these verses seem to me to require some variety of Penal Substitution theory of atonement.)
Romans 3:25-26 (referenced above)
Various phrases from Isaiah 53: “He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities;the chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, and by His scourging we are healed… The Lord caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him… He was cut off out of the land of the living, for the transgression of my people to whom the stroke was due… The Lord was pleased to crush Him, putting Him to grief…” There are other things in these verses too, but God’s people had sins which merited punishment (v.8), which God (v.6, v.10) placed upon Jesus (v.5).
1 Pet 2:24: “He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross”
1 Pet 3:18: “Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust” (especially, what is the relevance of this last phrase?)
2 Cor 5:21: “[God] made [Christ] who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf”
Gal 3:13: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us”
I’m not saying all of these verses are only “support” for the PST, but to me they all seem to presume elements of the PST which are not found in other theories, and I have a hard time interpreting Isaiah 53 without the notion of penal substitution.
Of course, the precise theory/metaphor used to understand the atonement is less important than the fact of the atonement and experiencing that. =-)
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I take Penal Substitution theory to mean that God inflicted upon Jesus the equivalent of the punishment that was due to us I see no need of this theory to ‘gets at God holiness’. I think there are considerable problems with the theory (lost a link that enumerates them) and prefer to keep it clear that the cross gets at God’s holiness.
Greg Boyd says elsewhere:
“Jesus’ work on the cross appeased the Father’s wrath, agreed with me that the Father wasn’t wrathful toward Jesus. It’s just that God’s wrath against sin was expressed by him delivering Christ up to the Powers in our place. Sin was judged and Christ was our substitute — hence, Penal Substitution. Adam informed me that this is basically the view of Karl Barth, expressed in his Church Dogmatics (which I will now certainly have to look into). Well, I replied, if that’s what you mean by the Penal Substitution view of the atonement, consider me a card carrying member!
And notice, this version of Penal Substitution is not only compatible with the Christus Victor view of the atonement (the view that the main thing Jesus did on Calvary was defeat the devil and free us from his oppression): it actually presupposes it. So, without retracting any of my criticism of the view that God needs to vent his wrath against Jesus in order to forgive us, maybe I can now espouse a Christus Victor Penal Substitution view of the atonement.” http://reknew.org/2008/10/a-christus-victor-and-penal-substitution-view-of-the-atonement/
“in Christ’s voluntary death, God has an excuse for indulgence.”
To whom does God require to make an excuse? God satisfies the requirements of His own justice within His own being, I think He has no reason for excuses.
You make a fair point about ‘cosmic child abuse’ which caused such a stir in Steve Chalks book. I fairly sure Steve was referring to that as a quote from another source.
With regards the various phrases from Isaiah 53 these verses do not say that God inflicted this punishment or wrath upon Christ the closest we get is that:
The Lord laid on Him the iniquity of us all – The full weight of humanities sin came down on Jesus and in a figure the lord laid it upon Him.
It pleased the LORD to bruise Him – we need to consider this in light of Gen. 3:15
He has put Him to grief – In that God assigned Him the direct task of redemption
which He voluntarily took up.
Thou shall make His soul an offering for sin – and so it was but it fails to say God inflicted wrath on Christ
The text of Isa 53 states that WE (in context Israel by extension others also) esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted – Not that this was the case but was what we esteemed.
Gal 3:13: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us”. All the quotes by the early Fathers I recently read fail to ascribe the curse as something God placed on Christ.
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