Penal substitution
Penal substitution (sometimes, esp. in older writings, called forensic theory) is a theory of the atonement within Christian theology, which declares that Christ, voluntarily submitting to God the Father's plan, was punished (penalized) in the place of sinners (substitution), thus satisfying the demands of justice so God can justly forgive sins making us at one with God (atonement). It began with Luther and continued to develop with the Calvinist tradition as a specific understanding of substitutionary atonement, where the substitutionary nature of Jesus' death is understood in the sense of a substitutionary fulfilment of legal demands for  the offenses of sins. Definition. The penal substitution theory teaches that Jesus suffered the penalty due by God the Father wrath for humanity's sins. Penal substitution derives from the idea that divine forgiveness must satisfy divine justice, that is, that God is not willing or able to simply forgive sin without first requiring a satisfaction for it. It states that God gave himself in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ, to suffer the death, punishment and curse due to fallen humanity as the penalty for our sin. Important theological concepts about penal substitution depend on the doctrine of  the Trinity. Those who believe that Jesus was himself God, in line with the doctrine of the Trinity, believe that God took the punishment upon himself rather than putting it on someone else. In other words, the doctrine of union with Christ affirms that by taking the punishment upon himself Jesus fulfils the demands of justice not for an unrelated third party but for those identified with him. If, in the penal substitution understanding of the atonement, the death of Christ deals with sin and injustice, his resurrection is the renewal and restoration of righteousness. Some other atonement theories are  the ransom theory, which says that Christ's death represents the cosmic defeat of the devil to whom a ransom had to be paid, e.g. Christ Victor theory, the rescue of humanity from the power of sin and death, a view popularized by Gustaf Aulén; and exemplary theory, associated with Peter Abelard and Hastings Rashdall, which argues that the cross had its effect on human beings, by setting forth a supreme example of godliness which we must follow. Development. The penal substitution theory is a specific interpretation of vicarious (substitutionary) atonement, which in turn goes back to Second Temple Judaism , although some evangelicals such as William Lane Craig cite the offer of Moses of the death of himself instead of the people of Israel (Exodus 32:30-34) as an example of this substitution. It was developed during the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, being advocated by Martin Luther and John Calvin. It was more concretely formulated by the Reformed theologian Charles Hodge (1797-1878). Advocates of penal substitution argue that the concept is both biblically-based and rooted in the historical traditions of the Christian Church. Vicarious atonement. The idea of vicarious atonement flows from Judaism. Isaiah 53:4-6 , 10, 11 refers to the "suffering servant": New Testament. The New Testament authors used various metaphors to explain and interpret the death and resurrection of Jesus. According to C. Marvin Pate, "there are three aspects to Christ's atonement according to the early Church: vicarious atonement [substitutionary atonement], the eschatological defeat of Satan [Christ the Victor], and the imitation of Christ [participation in Jesus' death and resurrection]." Pate further notes that these three aspects were intertwined in the earliest Christian writings, but that this intertwining was lost since the Patristic times. Key New Testament references which can be interpreted to  reflect a vicarious atonement of Jesus' death and resurrection include: On the basis of , N. T. Wright has argued that there are, in fact, different models of penal substitution in which ideas of justification work together with redemption and sacrifice. Early Church. The ransom theory of atonement was the nearly predominant view accepted in the period of the Early Church Fathers. As ransom theory of atonement began to fade from view in the Middle ages, other theories such as the satisfaction theory began to develop. It has been generally recognized that only hints of penal substitutionary atonement can be found  in the writing of the Early Church, with the most explicit articulations arriving during the time of the Reformation. Scholars vary when interpreting proposed precursors to penal substitution in the writings of some of the Early Church fathers, including Justin Martyr (c.100-165), Eusebius of Caesarea (c.275-339), Athanasius (c.300-373) and Augustine of Hippo (354-430). There is general agreement that no writer in the Early Church taught penal substitution as their primary theory of atonement. Yet some writers appear to reference some of the ideas of penal substitution as an afterthought or as an aside. Some see Augustine  as speaking about penal substitutionary atonement in his exposition of Psalm 51: "For even the Lord was subject to death, but not on account of sin: He took upon Him our punishment, and so looses our guilt" and in his Enchiridion he says: "Now, as men were lying under this wrath by reason of their original sin... there was need for a mediator, that is for a reconciler, who by the offering of one sacrifice, of which all the sacrifices of the law and the prophets were types, should take away this wrath... Now when God is said to be  angry, we do not attribute to Him such a disturbed feeling as exists in the mind of an angry man; but we call His just displeasure against sin by the name “anger” a word transferred by analogy from human emotions." The ransom theory of atonement is a substitutionary theory of atonement, just as penal substitution is. It can therefore be difficult to distinguish intended references to the ransom view by Early Church writers from real penal substitutionary ideas. The Fathers often worked upon biblical quotations, from both Testaments, describing Christ's saving work, sometimes adding one to another from different  places in Scripture. The dominant strain in the soteriological writings of the Greek Fathers, such as Athanasius of Alexandria (c.296/298–373), was the so-called "physical" theory that Christ, by becoming man, restored the divine image in us; but blended with this is the conviction that his death was necessary to release us from the curse of sin, and that he offered himself in sacrifice for us. Anselm (11th century). It was not until Anselm of Canterbury (1033/4–1109) wrote his famous work "Cur Deus Homo" (1098) that attention was focused on the theology of redemption with the aim of providing more  exact definitions. Anselm's view can best be understood from medieval feudalistic conceptions of authority, of sanctions and of reparation. Anselmian satisfaction contrasts with penal substitution in that Anselm sees the satisfaction (i.e. restitution) as an alternative to punishment. According to Anselm, "The honour taken away must be repaid, or punishment must follow" (bk 1 ch 8), whereas penal substitution views the punishment as the means of satisfaction. Comparing what was due to God and what was due to the feudal Lord, he argued that what was due to God was honor. "'Honor' comprises the whole complex of service and  worship which the whole creation, animate and inanimate, in heaven and earth, owes to the Creator. The honor of God is injured by the withdrawal of man's service which he is due to offer." This failure constitutes a debt, weight or doom, for which man must make satisfaction, but which lies beyond his competence; only if a new man can be found who by perfect obedience can satisfy God's honour and by some work of supererogation can provide the means of paying the existing debt of his fellows, can God's original purpose be fulfilled. So Christ not  only lives a sinless life, which is again his due, but also is willing to endure death for the sake of love. Although penal substitution is often associated with Anselm, he predates its formal development within Reformed theology. It is therefore doubted even among Reformed theologians whether his 'satisfaction' theory is strictly equivalent. Reformation. The Reformers claimed over and over to be recovering the truth of the Gospel from both the New Testament and the earliest Christian fathers. They generally believed doctrinal errors were introduced by the later fathers of the Middle Ages. Luther. Broadly speaking, Martin Luther followed Anselm , thus remaining mainly in the "Latin" model identified by Gustaf Aulén. He held, however, that Christ's atoning work encompassed both his active and passive obedience to the law: as the perfectly innocent God-man, he fulfilled the law perfectly during his life and, in his death on the cross, bore the eternal punishment that all men deserved for their breaking the law. Unlike Anselm, Luther thus combines both satisfaction and punishment. Furthermore, Luther rejected the fundamentally legalistic character of Anselm's paradigm in terms of an understanding of the Cross in the more personal terms of an actual conflict  between the wrath of God at the sinner and the love of God for the same sinner. For Luther this conflict was real, personal, dynamic and not merely forensic or analogical. If Anselm conceived of the Cross in terms a forensic duel between Christ's identification with humanity and the infinite value and majesty of his divine person, Luther perceived the Cross as a new Götterdammerung, a dramatic, definitive struggle between the divine attributes of God's implacable righteousness against the sinful humanity and inscrutable identification with this same helpless humanity which gave birth to a New Creation, whose undeniable  reality could only be glimpsed through faith and whose invincible power worked only through love. One cannot understand the unique character or force of Luther's and the Lutheran understanding of the Cross apart from this dramatic character which is not readily translated into or expressed through the more rational philosophical categories of dogmatic theology, even when these categories are those of Lutheran Orthodoxy itself. Calvin. Calvin appropriated Anselm's ideas but changed the terminology to that of the criminal law with which he was familiar—since he was trained as a lawyer. Man is guilty before God's  judgement and the only appropriate punishment is eternal death. The Son of God has become man and has stood in man's place to bear the immeasurable weight of wrath—the curse, and the condemnation of a righteous God. He was "made a substitute and a surety in the place of transgressors and even submitted as a criminal, to sustain and suffer all the punishment which would have been inflicted on them." Calvin made special appeal to the Suffering Servant passage in and to with its reference to the "Harrowing of Hell"—the release of the spirits of those who had  died before Christ. From the former, he singled out "But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed." Both are set, by Calvin within the context of Pilate's court of judgment to which, according to Dillistone, they do not properly belong; nevertheless, the image of "one who has borne the stripes and the chastisement which should, by strict desert have fallen" upon others, within the divine purpose, is, on all sides agreed to be an essential element in the  story. John Wesley. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, also held strongly to the penal substitution theory of the atonement, as did the majority of early Methodists including the first great Methodist systematic theologian Richard Watson. Kenneth J. Collins in his book "The Theology of John Wesley: Holy Love and the Shape of Grace" writes, "for Wesley, Christ makes compensation and satisfies the justice of God precisely by standing in the place of sinful humanity, by being reckoned among its numbers, and in the end by bearing the penalty, the very wages of sin." This is perhaps made the most  clear in Wesley's writing entitled "The Doctrine of Original Sin". In this treatise Wesley writes, "Our sins were the procuring cause of all his sufferings. His sufferings were the penal effects of our sins. 'The chastisement of our peace,' the punishment necessary to procure it, 'was' laid 'on him,' freely submitting thereto: 'And by his stripes' (a part of his sufferings again put for the whole) 'we are healed'; pardon, sanctification, and final salvation, are all purchased and bestowed upon us. Every chastisement is for some fault. That laid on Christ was not for his own, but ours; and  was needful to reconcile an offended Lawgiver, and offering guilty creatures, to each other. So 'the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all'; that is, the punishment due to our iniquity." The work of the Reformers, including Zwingli and Philip Melanchthon, was hugely influential. It took away from Christianity the requirement of works as a means of justification, whether corporal or spiritual, of the need for penance, belief in purgatory, etc; and it did so by emphasizing a finality of Christ's work. Criticisms and replies. Criticisms. Ever since the doctrine of penal substitution received full expression in  the Reformation period, it has been the subject of continual criticism on biblical, moral and logical grounds. A number of 21st-century works provide recent critiques. The first extensive criticism of the penal substitution came during the Reformation period from within the Anabaptist movement by Fausto Sozzini. He argued that penal substitution was "irrational, incoherent, immoral and impossible." His objections were as follows: Socinus thought that Jesus was not himself God and that he had not come in the flesh to intentionally die for humanity. Socinus argued against the Trinity. It thus follows as a natural consequence that it would  be unjust to punish Jesus for the sins of others. Similarly, his argument that a temporary death of one would not be sufficient to pay for all mankind's sins also flows from his premise that Jesus was only an ordinary man. Calvin's general framework, coinciding as it did with a rising respect for law, considered as a bulwark against the ferments of war, revolution and civil insurrection, remained normative for Reformed Christians for the next three centuries. Moreover, if Socinus spoke from the point of view of the radical reformers, there were also Catholics for whom the idea  of the once and for all nature of Christ's redeeming work would weaken the magisterial doctrines of sanctification, the spiritual life of the believer, and his or her appropriation of the divine mystery through the sacraments of penance and the Eucharist. Further, with the development of notions of inalienable personal responsibility in law, the idea of "penal" substitution has become less easy to maintain. In modern law, the punishment of the innocent and the acquittal of the guilty is regarded as the perfect example of injustice. Anglican theologian F. W. Dillistone stated that "no strictly penal theology of the  atonement can be expected to carry conviction in the world of the twentieth century." Among the problems identified is that the word "penal" implies an association with law, but the relationship between theological ideas and social institutions such as the law changes. The contemporary argument as to the relationship of human rights to positive law is a modern extension of this. Secondly, ideas of justice and punishment are not the same in Jewish law, imperial Roman law, sixteenth-century European law and modern common law. Thus, for instance, "satisfaction" and "merit" are understandable within the context of Roman law, but  sit less easily within either Old or New Testament conceptions. Likewise, when the word "penal" is used, it raises as many questions about the different theories of punishment, past and present. Thirdly, in Calvin's work, and subsequently, there is an interplay between legal and cultic language. Words such as "curse", "expiation", "propitiation", "wrath", and "sacrifice" appear together with sixteenth-century legal language. "The framework is legal, the process is cultic. Removal of legal sanctions is equated with freedom of access in worship." Calvin contends that it was necessary for Jesus to suffer through a judicial process and to be  condemned as a criminal (even though the process was flawed and Pilate washed his hands of the condemnation), but tying this to the need for sacrifice "proved to be a dead weight upon the thinking and imagining of Reformed Christendom." according to Dillistone. Next, the two words "expiation" and "propitiation" present problems. It has been argued that the former, which means to purge away, needs to be distinguished from the latter, which means to appease a person, and that it is propitiation which presents the problem for those who are critical of the idea of penal substitution. Karl Barth (and  later Jürgen Moltmann) argued in Church Dogmatics IV/1 that propitiation and expiation are false categories when applied to the triune God: If God forgives us in and through Christ ("Christ pays our debt"), then the cost has been borne by God in, as, and through Christ. For God to propitiate himself is expiation; because expiation is always self-propitiation as it means the forgiver paying the debt (here, the price of the sin) at his own expense. Hence Dietrich Bonhoeffer says grace is free, but is not cheap. Additionally, a view of human salvation which defines it in terms of  once-and-for-all acquittal has to deal with its relationship to subsequent actions and the lives of those not born at the time of the Paschal Mystery. Some, like Karl Barth, simply criticized the concept of satisfaction of God's wrath for being unscriptural. Replies. Proponents of penal substitution contend that critics overlook the repeated declarations of Jesus that he intended to die on the cross, and that his death was the very purpose for which he was born on the Earth (). It is irrelevant, they argue, whether it might be unjust to punish an innocent bystander involuntarily, since  the actual proposition is one of Jesus offering voluntarily to die on behalf of others, like a soldier throwing himself on a hand grenade to save his fellow soldiers. Jesus himself taught that "greater love has no one than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" () and repeatedly announced that he was intentionally going to Jerusalem, knowing that he was heading to his death (; ). Jesus' identity as himself being God is also central to penal substitution. Those who do not believe that Jesus was God visiting the Earth in human form necessarily conclude that God chose  a bystander named Jesus to suffer for others. However, those who believe that Jesus was actually God (; ) conclude that God—against whom mankind had sinned—came to accept the penalty upon himself. Thus, they see no injustice in God's choosing to come to Earth in order to take humanity's sin upon himself. However, the replies in these two paragraphs do not directly answer the objection that guilt is inherently non-transferable, whether the victim seeks to have it transferred or not. While they show that Jesus was not in the position of being punished involuntarily, they do not  show that it is possible or just to punish a willing innocent victim in place of the guilty. J. I. Packer admits that proponents do not know how this could be possible but choose to believe it anyway. J. I. Packer states that language must be used in a stretched sense. God is not a sixteenth-century monarch, he says, and divine government is not the same as earthly government. He states that Christians should regard all truth of God as an "apprehended mystery," and always hold that God is greater than our formularies. He holds, nonetheless, that penal substitution  can be described as a model in a way comparable to how physics uses the term. He defines the term model, in a theological sense, as "explanatory constructs formed to help us know, understand, and deal with God, the ultimate reality." He states that the "mystery of God is more than any one model, even the best, can express." He states that "all the knowledge we can have of the atonement is of a mystery which we can only think and speak by means of models." To Packer, the biblical models are presented as being inspired by God and given  to us as "knowledge of the mystery of the cross." The theologian Stephen Sykes has interpreted Packer's account of penal substitution as being presented as a metaphor. Theologians who advocate penal substitution are keen to define the doctrine carefully, rather than, as Packer says; "the primary question is, not the rationality or morality of God but the remission of one's sins." He suggests that it be seen not as a mechanical explanation (how it works) but rather than kerygmatically (what it means to us). Denney contends that the atonement should not be seen forensically (though as Packer says , Denney avoided the term "penal" in any case). What matters in Packer's view is that "Jesus Christ our Lord, moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us, endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined, and so won us forgiveness, adoption and glory." However, John Stott critiques loveless caricatures of the cross as "a sacrifice to appease an angry God, or ... a legal transaction in which an innocent victim was made to pay the penalty for the crimes of others" as being "neither the Christianity of the  Bible in general nor of Paul in particular." Furthermore, "It is doubtful if anybody has ever believed such a crude construction." Contemporary controversies. Controversy has arisen over a statement made by Steve Chalke that "The cross isn't a form of cosmic child abuse—A vengeful Father punishing his Son for an offense he has not even committed." This sparked a debate in the UK among evangelicals which is cataloged in the book "The Atonement Debate: Papers from the London Symposium on the Theology of Atonement" (Zondervan, 2008). The debate has largely been conducted in evangelical circles, though the dismissal  of the doctrine of penal substitution on moral grounds by Jeffrey John, an Anglo-Catholic priest and Dean of St Albans, in a broadcast talk during Holy Week 2007 has drawn fire in his direction. In his book "Mere Christianity" C. S. Lewis mentions that before becoming a Christian, the doctrine of penal substitution had seemed extremely unethical to him, and that while he had since found it to be less so, he nonetheless indicated a preference for a position closer to that of Athanasius, in which Christ's death is seen as enabling us to die to sin by  our participation, and not as a satisfaction or payment to justice as such. He also stated, however, that in his view no explanation of the atonement is as relevant as the fact of the atonement. Lewis's "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" in his fantasy fiction series, "The Chronicles of Narnia", depicts the king Aslan surrendering himself to Jadis the White Witch as a substitute for the life of Edmund Pevensie, which appears to illustrate a ransom or Christus Victor approach to the atonement. George MacDonald, a universalist Christian theologian who was a great influence on Lewis, wrote  against the idea that God was unable or unwilling to forgive humans without a substitutionary punishment in his "Unspoken Sermons," and stated that he found the idea to be completely unjust.