I love American exchange students, God bless 'em. A scene from earlier this week:

American Exchange Student: So in the medieval catholic system, supposing you did actually earn enough merit to get to heaven, what would you do when you arrived there?

Me: Well Aquinas taught that you could either go straight to heaven, or gamble your merit points and maybe win a speedboat.

AES: Really?

Me: Uh-huh.

AES: Woah. I never knew that.

It's a shame theologians don't write like this anymore:

Boso: I don't understand.

Anselm: That's because you're not as clever as me.

Boso: I see. You are so very wise Anselm.

Anselm: This is indeed true.

Boso: I concur. 

It’s been a while since I wrote anything on the atonement, but in the blogosphere you’re never far away from a debate on penal substitution. I wrote a fair bit on it in 2004 and early last year, mostly in discussion with Adrian Warnock and a few others. I was deemed to be “unbiblical” and “not a Christian” by Emergent No (but then, who isn’t?) and the matter got a little confused.

I still think it’s an important issue but it’s hard to discuss it rationally as it often becomes very emotive. Penal substitution as a means of explaining the biblical testimony and as an atonement theology has long since been put on the backburner of my own thought, but I’m not on some kind of mission to see it abolished. I just think there are better ways of understanding the atonement and that penal substitution has some flaws that need reconsideration.

Anyhow, Scot McKnight posted on the topic yesterday (and today) in anticipation of a new book he is writing on the matter. There’s some interesting discussion in the comments section of his post. In this piece I want to list some of the problems I have with the model. Some of them are better than others, but there are many better theologians than me out there, so feel free to chip in with criticism, but no name-calling or abusive e-mails (that really did happen) or you’ll be publicly named and shamed before the brethren.

This is my main objection to some explanations of PS. Christ certainly deals with sin and saves us from the wrath of God and reconciles us to God – I’ve never denied any of these things. My quibble is with the way they’re expressed and the way these concepts interrelate. Sin, wrath, justice, obedience, death, reconciliation and love are like pieces of a theological jigsaw which if not put together correctly can leave us with a rather distorted and disjointed picture of God, and I believe this is often the case with proponents of PS.

I actually really liked I. Howard Marshall’s defence of penal substitution that he gave last year for the Evangelical Alliance. He makes an important correction to an oft-occurring error in evangelical presentations of the atonement:

“…the holy and loving God upholds righteousness by judging sinners and saving those who accept what he has done in his Son on their behalf and instead of them. It is not a case of God being angry with Christ but of God himself in Christ taking on himself the sin and its penalty.” (16)

Similarly in John Stott’s The Cross of Christ we find:

“…crude interpretations of the cross emerge in some of our evangelical illustrations, as when we describe Christ coming to rescue us from the judgment of God, or when we portray him as the whipping boy who is punished instead of the real culprit…

[…]

“We must not then speak of God punishing Jesus, or of Jesus persuading God, for to do so is to set them over against one another as if they acted independently of one another or were even in conflict with one another. We must never make Christ the object of God’s punishment, or God the object of Christ’s persuasion.” (150-151)

And just for good measure, here’s Calvin:

“We do not insinuate, however, that God was ever hostile to him or was angry with him.” (Institutes, 2:16.11 – though Calvin does insist that God punishes Jesus, but that he was not angry with him when he did so.)

Yet compare this with the argument of Wayne Grudem:

“God poured out on Jesus the fury of his wrath. Jesus became the object of the intense hatred of sin and vengeance against sin which God had patiently stored up since the beginning of the world.” (Systematic Theology, 576)

And a very similar viewpoint was the crux (‘scuse the pun) of much of mine and Richard’s debate with Adrian over his explanation of the ‘simple Gospel'

“Despite our hatred for God, God still loves us. God does hate sin and has determined that sin must be punished, or else he could not be considered just […] Jesus took the punishment instead of us on the cross so that we could receive a pardon for our sins.”

Expressions of the atonement like Adrian’s and Wayne Grudem’s are the kind that I would strongly disagree with. They have a lot of the right pieces, but have put them together in the wrong order. I also disagree with Stott’s view of the atonement, but in other areas that I won’t discuss here.

Does God punish Jesus? Absolutely not. In fact the question is self-defeating, because it distinguishes between ‘God’ and ‘Jesus’ so as to make them separable and perhaps even independent entities. It is inherently dualistic and makes nonsense of much of the New Testament teaching about the incarnation, which brings me to my next objection.

What I mean by dualism is this: God does not manifest himself to us in one way, when he is actually quite different in reality. ‘God’ is not one way, and ‘Jesus’ another, on the contrary:

“He is the image of the invisible God…For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell…” (Col 1:15,19)

And in John:

“No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” (John 1:18)

“Phillip said to him: Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Phillip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has me has seen the Father. How can you say ‘show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?” (John 14:8-10)

And lastly, Hebrews:

“He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being.”

(Heb 1:3)

Despite a consistent witness across the whole NT, there remains an interminable error in many strands of theology that conceives of God as being somewhat different to Jesus. T F Torrance describes the confusion:

“’Is God like Jesus?' Questions like that which gnaw at the back of people's minds but which they suppress and which come to the surface only in moments of sharp crisis and hurt, tell us of the insidious damage done to people's faith by dualist habits of thought which drive a wedge between Jesus and God. [...] It is quite different when the face of Jesus is identical with the face of God, when his forgiveness of sin is forgiveness indeed for its promises is made good through the atoning sacrifice of God in Jesus Christ, and when the perfect love of God embodied in him casts out all fear.”

So what has this to do with penal substitution? An awful lot actually. Firstly it means that it is impossible to talk of God punishing Jesus, because God is not external to Christ, God dwells in Christ, and Christ reveals God perfectly and fully on the cross. So suggestions that “God poured out on Jesus the fury of his wrath” or that “Jesus became the object of the intense hatred of sin and vengeance against sin which God had patiently stored up since the beginning of the world” are both theologically and biblically incoherent (sorry Grudem fans).

Secondly, if Jesus is the full and supreme revelation of God, the cross shows not that the Father punishes the Son, but that in Christ God takes the full condition and sin of humanity upon himself. He also takes all the consequences of sin upon himself and puts an end to it. In Christ God says ‘Amen’ to his own verdict upon sinful humanity. This is what Barth referred to as “the Judge judging himself in our place,” but it is not the same thing as saying God punished Christ, or that God poured his fury and wrath out upon Christ, or that God was persuaded to forgive us only because Christ took the punishment instead of us.

I need to make one thing clear first of all: you can’t have a doctrine of atonement that doesn’t take wrath into account. The wrath of God against sin is a prominent feature of the New Testament, and you have to reckon with it in theology, regardless of how unpopular or uncomfortable it might be.

Nevertheless, this does not mean that we are saved from God’s wrath because he takes it out on Jesus instead of us. There is no space to go through the all the texts, but Romans 1 seems to teach that humankind has turned to idolatry and no longer worships God. As result, they have become evil and corrupt and commit even greater acts of depravity, and God in turn gives them over to even worse depravity still. In this situation humanity is enslaved to sin and facing only a terrible divine judgment.

So far so good, but it is huge leap of logic to say that God then deals with this wrath by punishing Jesus instead of humanity. As we have already seen, this is an illogical and incorrect way to talk about the cross.

Supporters of PS are quick to leap in at this point and say “ah well, but sin must be punished.” But this is not necessarily so. Sin can be repented of, and satisfaction can be made. Reconciliation does not require punishment or retribution first.

In fact until the Reformers this was the dominant view of the atonement in the Western tradition, most notably in the work of Anselm (1034-1109). In his classic work Cur Deus Homo? Anselm argues that God requires man to be fully obedient to him, but since man has failed to do this, man is in God’s debt. Man is then in a bit of a quandary: he owes God full obedience, but has failed to do so. He is now in debt to God and cannot pay it. Man owes the debt, but only God has the power to pay it. Thus God becomes man, and in Christ humanity gives the full obedience to God that had been lacking previously, and the deficit of disobedience is eradicated: man and God are reconciled. Here’s Paul:

For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.”

(Rom 5:18-19)

In this system, humanity is delivered from God’s wrath not by Jesus being punished instead of humankind, but because as the representative and head of humankind, Jesus leads us out from the place of wrath, disobedience, and slavery to sin and leads us back to God. We are reconciled with God and delivered from wrath by Jesus Christ (Rom 5:9), but no punishment is required to make amends for sin. We escape punishment not because Christ is punished in our place, but he releases us from punishment by making good on the debt of obedience that man owes to God.

Here’s Anselm:

“It is a necessary consequence, therefore, that either the honour [of God] which has been taken should be repaid, or punishment should follow.” (CDH? 1.13)

He argues that atonement is either by substitutionary obedience OR by substitutionary punishment. If Christ is perfectly obedient in our place, then no punishment is necessary, what is owed to God is repaid. Christ is “the perfect penitent.” (C. S. Lewis)

I’m going to end this post here or it’ll just get too long, though I have much more to write. One question I put to Jollyblogger and Adrian last year (which I never got an answer on) was how does the punishment of Christ alter the condition of humanity? How does it free humanity from the power of sin?

You need to connect Christ’s obedience with the resurrection of course, but that’s for another post ;)