Is there a 'Problem of Forgiveness'? Dissonant voices

Four voices.  Only one of them resembles the tone and accent of the Master.

Faustus Socinus (1578)

As we saw elsewhere Paul likewise instructs us to be imitators of God: just as he forgave our sins through Christ, we should forgive each other, but if God so forgave our sins through Christ, that he yet demanded the punishment of them from Christ itself, what prevents us from seeking satisfaction for ourselves for the offenses of our neighbours?

Brian McLaren (2006)

The traditional understanding says that God asks of us something that God is incapable of Himself. God asks us to forgive people. But God is incapable of forgiving. God can’t forgive unless He punishes somebody in place of the person He was going to forgive. God doesn’t say things to you—Forgive your wife, and then go kick the dog to vent your anger. God asks you to actually forgive. And there’s a certain sense that, a common understanding of the atonement presents a God who is incapable of forgiving. Unless He kicks somebody else.

Steve Chalke (2004)

Is it not strange for Jesus (God incarnate) on the one hand to say ‘do not return evil for evil’ while still looking for retribution himself? Similarly wouldn’t it be inconsistent for God to warn us not to be angry with each other and yet burn with wrath himself, or tell us to ‘love our enemies’ when he obviously couldn’t quite bring himself to do the same without demanding massive appeasement? If these things are true, what does it mean to ‘be perfect…as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Matt 5:48)? If it is true that Jesus is ‘the Word of God’ then how can his message be inconsistent with his nature? If the cross has anything to do with penal substitution then Jesus teaching becomes a divine case of ‘do as I say, not as I do’. I, for one, believe that God practices what he preaches!

John Stott (1986)

'Why should our forgiveness depend on Christ's death?'...'Why does God not simply forgive us, without the necessity of the cross?'...'After all', the objector may continue, 'if we sin against another, we are required to forgive one another.  We are even warned of dire consequences if we refuse.  Why can't God practise what he preaches and be equally generous?  Nobody's death is necessary before we forgive each other.  Why then does God make such a fuss about forgiving us and even declare it impossible without his Son's "sacrifice for sin"?' 

For us to argue, 'We forgive each other unconditionally, let God do the same to us', betrays not sophistication but shallowness, since it overlooks the elementary fact that we are not God.  We are private individuals, and other people's misdemeanours are personal injuries.  God is not a private individual, however, nor is sin just a personal injury.  On the contrary, God himself is the maker of the laws we break, and sin is rebellion against him. 

The reason why many people give the wrong answers to questions about the cross, and even ask the wrong questions, is that they have carefully considered neither the seriousness of sin nor the majesty of God.

The Meaning of the Cross

According to the SCM's (the Student Christian Movement) 1919 "Aim and Basis" this is what the cross means:

It is only as we see on Calvary the price of suffering paid day by day by God himself for all human sin, that we can enter into the experience of true penitence and forgiveness, which sets us free to embark upon a wholly new way of life...This is the meaning of the Atonement.

Reading these words afresh it struck me that this statement resonates with several, shall we call them 'Emergentesque' for want of a better word, affirmations of the cross.

This is hardly surprising since the SCM statement is the impulse of a certain caste of heart and mind, and it rests on specific presuppositions concerning God and man, and concerning the breakdown in divine-human relations and how they are to be restored.  If those presuppositions are shared we should expect contemporary authors to assemble, using Biblical vocabulary, a message about the meaning of the cross akin to that of the non-Evangelical SCM.

John Stott offered the following observations on this statement in the preface to his book The Cross of Christ:

But we have respectfully to respond that the meaning of the atonement is not to be found in our penitence evoked by the sight of Calvary, but rather in what God did when in Christ on the cross he took our place and bore our sin. 

This distinction between an 'objective' and 'subjective' understanding of the atonement needs to be made clear in every generation.

Whilst I agree with what he wrote back in 1986, we should be able to see that the SCM statement has an objective element ("the price of suffering paid day by day by God himself") as well as a subjective one ("we can enter into the experience of true penitence and forgiveness, which sets us free to embark upon a wholly new way of life").  In fact we can say that the SCM statement acknowledges that the objective act of God precedes the subjective response on our part.

The crux of the matter is not the distinction between the objective and the subjective aspects of the atonement but the nature of the objective understanding of the atonement, the meaning of what God did at the cross, why he did it, and why it was necessary for him to do it in the first place.

On this point the SCM position and that of the classical Evangelicalism with its roots in the Reformation really represent two different religions both using the same stock of language.  Look at what they are saying about God and his nature, man and his fall, sin and its effects, and you begin to see that no amount of verbal similarity can compensate for the fact that they represent diametrically opposed theologies.

Polly Toynbee on the repugnancy of the atonement

The columnist Polly Toynbee wrote an article in The Guardian on 5th December 2005 with the rather acerbic title “Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion.”

I will spare you the full extent of her invective against the Christian imagery found in C.S. Lewis' children's stories. But among her numerous thorny remarks the following stood out:

Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to?

Perhaps the most obvious thing to say by way of explanation about her choice of adjective, is that it is indicative of a heart wedded to the wisdom of this passing age. It is as straightforward a statement of aversion and distaste at the very notion of a substitutionary atonement as one could wish to find. And yet, to those who hold to the presuppositions laid out by Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:8, it hardly comes as much of a surprise.

It stands in marked contrast to the expression of the regenerate heart that sees in the cross both the wisdom and power of God. Of all the great confessions of faith perhaps it is the Belgic Confession (Q. 26) that best verbalizes the sentiments of the regenerate mind:

If, then, we should seek for another mediator who would be favorably inclined toward us, whom could we find who loved us more than He who laid down His life for us, even while we were His enemies? And if we seek for one who has power and majesty, who is there that has so much of both as He who sits at the right hand of God and to whom hath been given all authority in heaven and on earth?

And what should we make of her question? Of course we did not ask Christ to die for us. None of us wanted him to. This is a point underlined, as it were in thick marker pen, time and again on the pages of the Bible. From Isaiah's description of Christ as despised and rejected by men (Isaiah 53:3) all the way to Paul's retrospective description of Christian believers as being ungodly and enemies toward God (Romans 5:6, 10).

This point came home to me yesterday. In the book of Judges there is the pattern of apostasy, oppression from enemies, and cries to God for relief from this misery. In his grace God raises up judges who save the people of God from the hands of their oppressors. Judges 13 seemingly opens with this same pattern. Israel has turned from God to their evil ways, and God has handed them over to the Philistines. But the pattern ends there. Just when we expect to hear a cry to God for relief and rescue there is nothing but silence.

When the Angel of the Lord announces the birth of Samson, who will begin to save Israel from the Philistines, it is therefore clear that this is an act of sheer grace on God's part. God sent them a Savior, even though they did not ask him to. The span of time between the book of Judges and that column in The Guardian may have spread over several millenia, but chronology cannot cover up the similarities that exist.

The very glory of the atonement is that Christ died for his enemies. We were not seeking after a Saviour from heaven, but running and hiding from the God who is really there. As Paul reminded the Colossians, it was for those who were hostile in their minds toward God that Christ hung on the cross. It was by that death that he made peace and effected reconciliation with God (Colossians 1:19-22). Like Polly Toynbee, I never asked him to do this. That he did it at all is all to the praise of his glorious grace.

The terrible anathema

Referring to Paul's solemn, sobering words in Galatians 1:6-10, George Smeaton wrote:

Were the atonement not the principal matter of the gospel, and the highest exhibition of the united wisdom, love and faithfulness of God,--in a word, the greatest act of God in the universe,--that terrible anathema on its subverters would seem to us something inexplicable, if not intolerable. But the doom is justified by the nature of Christ's death, and by the great fact of the atonement.

The Apostles' Doctrine of the Atonement, p. 19

Penal substitution in the dock (2): Dismantling the charge of "cosmic child abuse"

More from Garry Williams' 2005 EA Symposium paper.

Read the whole paper here.

But what, lastly, about the dark side of this criticism, its accusation that penal substitution, is, as Chalke says, tantamount to a form of child abuse?33 The claim is that any infliction of pain on a child by a parent is unjust, and that penal substitution mandates such infliction. There is an immediate problem here with the criticism, namely that the Lord Jesus Christ when he died was a child in the sense that he was a son, but not in the sense that he was a minor. As an adult, he had a mature will which could choose to co-operate or not with the will of his Father. So we are in fact looking at a father and an adult son who will together for the father to inflict suffering on the son, as we have seen in our Trinitarian exploration.

But there is a major problem here for the critics of penal substitution. While they have used the feminist critique of the cross as a critique of penal substitution, it is in its original form a critique not of penal substitution but of the Christian doctrine of redemption generally. It attacks the general idea that the Father willed the suffering of the Son, not the specific idea that he willed the penal substitutionary suffering of the Son. Let me give you the criticism, as found in the work of Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker:

The central image of Christ on the cross as the savior of the world communicates the message that suffering is redemptive. […] The message is complicated further by the theology that says Christ suffered in obedience to his Father’s will. Divine child abuse is paraded as salvific and the child who suffers “without even raising a voice” is lauded as the hope of the world.34

Furthermore, it is evident that Brown and Parker attack not just the idea that Jesus was a passive sufferer, but even the idea that he was the active Subject of the cross, an idea Green endorses. If Jesus was active in accepting his suffering, then we have a model of the victim of suffering being responsible for it. Such a model will mandate blaming victims.35

For many feminists their criticism results in the rejection of Christianity because it undeniably involves the idea that God purposed the sufferings of Christ. Others try to rescue a re-invented theology, but I have to say I am with the rejectionists. If purposed redemptive suffering is an insurmountable problem, then Christianity must go. The child abuse problem in their minds remains with any model of the atonement which maintains divine sovereignty, even in a limited form. Unless we remove the suffering of the Son from the realm of events over which God rules, then God wills it.36

Hence there is a trajectory from unease with penal substitution to a denial of the rule of God over the cross, and thence, we may presume, the world. In the more frank writers, this trajectory emerges clearly. J. Denny Weaver, for example, in arguing for a non-violent view of the atonement which he terms ‘narrative Christus Victor’, sees that to succeed he must remove the cross from the plan and purpose of God. He explains that Jesus was not sent to die, that his death was not the will of God, that it was not needed or aimed at by God.37

Yet in terms of the metaphysics of the divine relation to creation, even this view is unsustainable. So long as God sustains the world in which the Son suffers, then in a strong sense he wills the suffering of the Son. If he does not stop history as the first blow is struck, then he wills that the Son suffer.

There is something which prevents him intervening to rescue his beloved Son, some purpose he intends to achieve through the suffering, and therefore a strong sense in which even such a diminished god as Weaver’s wills the suffering. If someone else had wrested from God his work in sustaining the world, if we lived and moved and had our being elsewhere, then perhaps we could say that God did not will the suffering of the Son. But my hope is that none of the participants in this debate think that.

Which means that any view where God maintains control, even at arm’s length, succumbs to the feminist criticism. Their target is not just penal substitution. We therefore need to ask about that criticism itself. Are they right? They are evidently not so with regard to penal substitution itself. According to penal substitution, the cross does not have the character simply of suffering, but of necessary penal suffering for a good end. It is in this sense ‘violent’, but not reducible to the category of ‘violence’. Can we conceive of scenarios in which an adult son and father rightly together will the suffering of the son? Indeed we can, we can imagine endless such scenarios, such as a father who directs teams of Médecins Sans Frontières, sending a son into an area where he knows the son may suffer greatly. He wills it, the son wills to go. There is no injustice here, because the purpose is good. The same applies in the case of penal substitution.

In fact the feminist criticism really only applies when we deny penal substitution, because it is then that we are in danger of denying the necessity of the suffering of the Son. According to penal substitution the necessity of punishment arises from God’s own nature and his divine government.38 He is bound only by who he is, by faithfulness to himself. On the other hand, if we opt for some kind of voluntarist account wherein the suffering of the Son is not a necessity arising from divine justice, then we are left with a very difficult question, with the feminists’ question at its most acute. If God can freely remit sins, we must ask, why did the Father send the Son purposing his death, as Acts 2:23 says? The more deeply we grasp the Trinity, the love of the Father for the Son, the more we will ask why a loving Father would lay the burden of suffering on his eternally beloved Son.

Penal substitution preserves a necessity, which alone explains why this needed to happen as part of God’s saving plan. Remove the necessity, deny penal substitution, and then you are left with the unjustifiable suffering of the Son. Then you feel the full force of the feminists criticism, because you have the Father willing the suffering of the Son for no necessary reason. For instance, Christus Victor by itself without penal substitution does not explain why Christ needed to suffer like this. Deny penal substitution and you ham-stringing Christus Victor. Hence it is that in Colossians 2:13-15 the victory over the rulers and authorities is accomplished by forensic means, by the cancellation of the legal bond (Colossians, 2:14).

Penal substitution is central in terms of its explanatory power with regard to the justice of the other models, and that claim affirms rather than denies the existence of other models. Without penal substitution, the rejectionist feminists are right that the Father has no sufficient reason to inflict suffering on the Son. A cross without penal substitution therefore would indeed mandate the unjustified infliction of suffering on children, because it would have no basis in justice.

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33 ‘Cross Purposes’, p. 47.

34 Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker, ‘For God So Loved the World?’, in Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse, ed. Joannne Carlson Brown and Carole R. Bohn (New York: Pilgrim, 1989), pp. 1-30 (p. 2).

35 Here is how they criticise Jurgen Moltman’s statement that Jesus suffered actively: ‘Jesus is responsible for his death on the cross, just as a woman who walks alone at night on a deserted street is to blame when she is raped’, ‘For God So Loved’, p. 18.

36 Here I agree with Hans Boersma in Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2004), p. 41: ‘Only by radically limiting Christ’s redemptive role to his life (so that his life becomes an example to us) or by absolutely dissociating God from any role in the cross (turning the crucifixion into a solely human act) can we somehow avoid dealing with the difficulty of divine violence.’ Cf. p. 117.

37 The Nonviolent Atonement (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2001), p. 132: ‘In narrative Christus Victor, Jesus’ mission is certainly not about tricking the devil. Neither did the Father send him for the specific purpose of dying, nor was his mission about death […]. And since Jesus’ mission was to make the reign of God visible, his death was not the will of God as it would be if it is a debt payment owed to God. In narrative Christus Victor, the death of Jesus is clearly the responsibility of the forces of evil, and it is not needed by or aimed at God.’

38 Contra Joel Green: ‘Within a penal substitution model, God’s ability to love and relate to humans is circumscribed by something outside of God—that is, an abstract concept of justice instructs God as to how God must behave.’ (Recovering, p. 147).

Penal substitution in the dock (1): Why doesn't God turn the other cheek if he expects us to?

As a follow up to Guy Davies' interview with Garry Williams it is well worth reading Garry's paper, "Justice, Law and Guilt," given at the Evangelical Alliance Symposium on Penal Substitution (July 2005). The paper is a very fine defense of specific criticisms levelled against penal substitution. It repays careful reading.

You can download it here.

I will be posting some extracts from the paper.

1. Faustus Socinus, Steve Chalke and the Example of Jesus

A key argument which is used against retributive punishment by theological opponents of penal substitution is that it is ruled out by Jesus’s own teaching on how we should relate to one another. A form of this argument was used as far back as Faustus Socinus in 1578.4

A more recent form is found in the work of Walter Wink. He cites the Babylonian Enuma Elish myth as an ancient instance of the view that violence is ‘the central dynamic of existence’ which ‘possesses ontological priority over good’.5 In this ancient ‘myth of redemptive violence’, the spiral of heavenly violence triggers the creation itself and then continues through history: ‘Heavenly events are mirrored by earthly events, and what happens above happens below.’6 As in heaven, so on earth.

Now the opponents of penal substitution want to endorse this principle: the way you describe God is the way you will behave. Steve Chalke tells us that this kind of mirroring is contradicted by penal substitution in an unthinkable fashion when it says that we should not mirror God: ‘If the cross has anything to do with penal substitution then Jesus’ teaching becomes a divine case of “do as I say, not as I do”. I, for one, believe that God practices what he preaches!’7 In short, Jesus says ‘turn the other cheek’, so how could God punish in a way that exacts satisfaction for sin? If God denies retribution to us, he must eschew it himself.

In reply to this Socinian argument there is a clear counter-case which suggests a quite different construal of the relation between divine and human justice. The Apostle Paul distinguishes sharply the different spheres of justice which operate within creation and between God and creation. At the end of Romans 12 he follows Jesus in teaching that we must not take revenge. Here, then, is his ideal opportunity to point out that we must not because God does not. But the striking thing is that Paul does the opposite. He explains that individuals must not take revenge precisely because God is going to do so: ‘Do not take revenge my friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord’ (12:19, quoting Deut. 32:35). From here Paul moves to argue in 13:1-7 that God has given a limited remit to the state to implement this final justice in the present time by the power of the sword.

Paul could therefore deny vengeance in the sphere of human personal conduct, and at the same time ascribe retribution to God, shared in limited part with the ruling authorities. Where Chalke would have us infer that God would never do what he tells us not to do, Paul argues exactly the opposite. God would have us not do what he does precisely because he does it. God says 'do as I say, not as I do,' and justly so, since he is God and we are not.

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4 Faustus Socinus, De Iesu Christo Servatore, iii. 2, in Opera Omnia, Vols 1-2 of Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum Quos Unitarios Vocant, 8 Vols (Irenopoli: post 1656), 2:115-246: Paulus itidem, ut alibi vidimus, monet nos, ut imitators Dei sumus: et quemadmodum is per Christum peccata nobis condonavit, sic nos invicem condonemus. Quod si Deus ita per Christum nobis peccata condonavit, ut interim ab ipso Christo eorum poenas repetierit, quid vetat, quo minus eos, ex Pauli praescripto, Deum imitate, pro offensis proximi nostri non quidem ab ipso, se dab alio quopiam, ut modo dicebamus, nobis satisfieri curemus? = ‘As we saw elsewhere, Paul likewise instructs us to be imitators of God: just as he forgave our sins through Christ, so we should forgive each other. But if God so forgave our sins through Christ, that he yet demanded the punishments of them from Christ himself, what prevents us, on the basis of Paul’s command, as imitators of God, from seeking satisfaction for ourselves for the offences of our neighbour not from the man himself, but from anyone else, as we were just saying?’ (GW translation).

5 Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), p. 14.

6 Engaging, p. 15.

7 ‘Cross Purposes’, p. 47.

Against Penal Substitution: Warfield & Machen

The fact is, the views men take of the atonement are largely determined by their fundamental feelings of need - by what men most long to be saved from

B.B. Warfield

“They (the liberal preachers) speak with disgust of those who believe 'that the blood of our Lord, shed in substitutionary death, placates an alienated deity and makes possible welcome for the returning sinner'. Against the doctrine of the cross they use every weapon of caricature and vilification. Thus they pour out their scorn upon a thing so holy and so precious that in the presence of it the Christian heart melts in gratitude too deep for words. It never seems to occur to modern liberals that in deriding the Christian doctrine of the cross, they are trampling on human hearts.”

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, p.120

In his address 'Modern Theories of the Atonement,' given in 1902, B. B. Warfield observed the revolt against penal substitution that gained momentum in the late nineteenth century. He noted that this revolt prompted an immediate and equally powerful defence. However, 'this defense only stemmed the tide, it did not succeed in rolling it back.' He wrote:

The ultimate result has been that the revolt from the conceptions of satisfaction, propitiation, expiation, sacrifice, reinforced continually by tendencies adverse to evangelical doctrine peculiar to our times, has grown steadily more and more widespread, and in some quarters more and more extreme, until it has issued in an immense confusion on this central doctrine of the gospel. (p. 286)

Whenever there is a revolt against the particular theological conception of a doctrine, in this case of the cross as a penal substitutionary atonement, one can usually find a concomitant tone of rhetoric that casts that doctrine in as unfavourable a light as possible. And of course one ought to expect to find the promotion of an alternative doctrinal framework also.

Warfield made the following judicious statement on the status of penal substitution at the dawn of the twentieth century that is remarkably apropros for today's evangelical scene:

Probably the majority of those who hold the public ear, whether as academical or as popular religious guides, have definitely broken with it, and are commending to their audiences something other and, as they no doubt believe, something very much better. A tone of speech has even grown up regarding it which is not only scornful but positively abusive. There are no epithets too harsh to be applied to it, no invectives too intense to be poured out on it. (p. 287)

As insulting, inappropriate, and offensive as a phrase such as 'cosmic child abuse' may be, the impulse to verbally deprecate penal substitution is, at least, not a contemporary phenomenon. Nor for that matter are 21st century alternatives to penal substitution anything other than older forms of atonement theology repackaged for a contemporary audience. Again we find that little has changed since Warfield's assessment of 'modern theories of the atonement':

Perhaps at no other period was Christ so frequently or so passionately set forth as merely a social Saviour. Certainly at no other period has his work been so prevalently summed up in mere revelation. (p. 284)

The reason for this is surely obvious. The is a direct relationship between our grasp of human need and our understanding of the work that Christ undertook to meet that need. If we conceive of our deepest need as one of being in state of error, or ignorance, a state exacerbated by our wayward living, then we will see Christ largely, if not exclusively, as a teacher and example. Warfield neatly summarizes this tendency as follows:

The fact is, the views men take of the atonement are largely determined by their fundamental feelings of need - by what men most long to be saved from. (p. 283)

This straightforward insight tells us something very significant about the present status and future of penal substitution. Even though, in the last fifty years, we have had many able defenders of penal substitution (from Leon Morris, Roger Nicole, Jim Packer, John Stott, down to the recent volume Pierced For Our Transgressions) we are warranted in repeating Warfield's conclusion for our own day, 'this defense only stemmed the tide, it did not succeed in rolling it back.' The doctrine of penal substitution has not been lacking the most able of academic and popular defenders, but this defense has yet to win the day.

The preservation and future success of penal substitution is a supernatural work. Only God can uncover the appalling need we stand in for a Saviour to give his life in place of ours; only God can so convict of sin and guilt that we will flee to Christ for refuge; only God can give faith to turn from ourselves and to look to Christ crucified in our place according to the testimony of the Scriptures.

The outcome of the 21st century revolt against penal substitution will not bypass the need for solid exegetical and theological books on the subject, but it will require more than this. It will require the kind of experiential grasp of sin and salvation, produced by the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts through the Word, that Warfield described so powerfully:

If we have not much sin to be saved from, why, certainly, a very little atonement will suffice for our needs. It is, after all, only the sinner who requires a Saviour. But if we are sinners, and in proportion as we know ourselves to be sinners, we will cry out for that Saviour who only after he was perfected by suffering could become the Author of eternal salvation. (p. 297)

[All quotations are from 'Modern Theories of the Atonement,' in The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield, Volume IX, Studies in Theology.]

Fact, theory, and the death of Christ

Originally posted in January 2008:

It is impossible to think about the death of Jesus without holding to an interpretation of the meaning of his death. At a very crude level, our interpretation of it will either be natural or supernatural, it will limit the horizon of explanation to the actions of men or it will include along with the actions of men the plan and purpose of God.

Having made this choice we are then faced with either a divinely given interpretation, which we must then receive, or an interpretation (or set of interpretations) that are coloured by our cultural situation and personal preferences. If the latter, then the doctrine of the atonement will alters its meaning over time.

What we cannot avoid is having an explanation of the meaning of the cross at all. The moment that we contemplate this death we are confronted with words like "Christ," "sin," "atonement," "for," and even "death" itself. These words convey to us the meaning of the cross.

The following lengthy extract if from Gresham Machen's What is Faith? The passing of time has not altered the relevance of his observations. The tendency for man to separate what God has joined together, fact and theory, event and explanation, is still very much with us.

Machen makes some important points about this issue:

We can have the fact of the atonement, it is said, no matter what particular theory of it we hold, and indeed even without holding any particular theory of it at all. So this substitutionary view, it is said, is after all only one theory among many.

This objection is based upon a mistaken view of the distinction between fact and theory, and upon a somewhat ambiguous use of the word "theory." What is meant by a "theory"?

Undoubtedly the word often has rather an unfavourable sound; and the use of it in the present connection might seem to imply that the view of the atonement which is designated as a "theory" is a mere effort of man to explain in his own way what God has given.

But might not God have revealed the "theory" of a thing just as truly as the thing itself; might he not himself have given the explanation when he gave the thing?

In that case the explanation just as much as the thing itself comes to us with divine authority, and it is impossible to accept one without accepting the other.

We have not yet, however, quite penetrated to the heart of the matter. Men say that they will accept the fact of the atonement without accepting the substitutionary theory of it, and indeed without being sure of any theory of it at all.

The trouble with this attitude is that the moment we say "atonement" we have already overstepped the line that separates fact from theory; an "atonement," even in the most general and most indefinite sense that could conceivably be given to the word, cannot possibly be a mere fact, but is a fact as explained by its purpose and result...What we have really done is to designate the event with an explanation of its meaning.

It is impossible for us to obtain the slightest benefit from a mere contemplation of the death of Christ; all the benefit comes from from our knowledge of the meaning of that death, or in other words (if the term be used in a high sense) from our "theory" of it.

If, therefore, we speak of the bare "fact" of the atonement, as distinguished from the "theory" of it, we are indulging in a misleading use of of words; the bare fact is the death, and the moment we say "atonement" we have committed ourselves to a theory [MD: we are committed to a theory when we say death].

The important thing, then, is, since we must have some theory, that the particular theory that we hold shall be correct.

Gresham Machen, What is Faith?, p. 145-6

Does God need to be reconciled to us?

I'm currently writing a chapter for a book. The chapter title is "Heresy Never Dies: The shadow of Socinianism falls on Evangelicalism." The Socinians were a 16th and 17th century group that denied the trinity, the deity of Christ (obviously), justification sola fide, penal substitution, eternal hell, and God's exhaustive foreknowledge (yup, they are the ancestors of Clark Pinnock and the other openness guys on that one).

The Racovian Catechism has the following to say about the death of Christ and reconciliation (Section V, Chapter 8):

...the Scripture never asserts that God was reconciled to us by Christ, but that we were reconciled to him; which indicates no wrath on his part, but our aversion to him, and our enmity against him. Wherefore the satisfaction, which they fancy, can by no means be inferred from any of those passages.

As I read that I also remembered coming across the following footnote, quite unrelated to Socinianism, in Don Carson's chapter "Atonement in Romans 3:21-26" in The Glory of the Atonement (Hill & James, eds):

As Paul uses "reconciliation" terminology, the movement in reconciliation is always of the sinner to God. God is never said to be reconciled to us; we must be reconciled to him. At the level of exegesis, those are the mere facts.

On the other hand, because the same exegesis also demands that we take the wrath of God seriously, and the texts insist that God takes decisive action in Christ to deal with our sin so that his wrath is averted, in that sense we may speak of God being "reconciled to us": Wesley was not wrong to teach us to sing "My God is reconciled," provided it is recognized that his language is drawn from the domain of constructive theology and not from the narrower domain of explicit exegesis (although, we insist equally, the constructive theology is itself grounded in themes that are exegetically mandated). (p. 134, n. 53)

In due course I will post some comments by John Owen on this point from his work Vindicae Evangelicae.

Agnus Victor: Ovey, Sach and Reeves discuss the Cross

Thanks to Rosemary Grier for drawing my attention to the Table Talk discussion on the Cross with Mike Reeves, Mike Ovey and Andrew Sachs (the latter two along with Steve Jeffrey are the authors of Pierced For Our Transgressions).

This is a great discussion about penal substitution, Christus Victor, the character of God and the good news, and the pastoral implications of all these truths.

Below is a bottom end of an overly long post from yesterday.

Penal Substitution and Christus Victor

The first question of the Heidelberg Catechism views the atoning work of Christ as dealing with the satisfaction made for all our sins (penal substitution) and his redeeming us from all the power of the devil (Christus Victor). When Scripture explicates how Christ conquers the devil, the reality of which is anticipated in the proto-evangelium (Gen. 3:15), it views the power of the devil as the power of deception and accusation. Our legal position before God, in view of Adam's breaking of the covenant of works (Gen. 2:15-17), and our own sins, has rendered us guilty, cursed, and under the sentence of death (Rom. 6:23).

How does Christ redeem us from the power of the devil? By dying for us (1 Peter 3:18). By taking our curse and punishment (Gal. 3:13). By enduring the wrath of God (Rom. 3:25-26). By taking the full penalty of the law (Gal. 3:10).

The legal accusations of Satan are silenced by the blood of the Lamb that has brought us forgiveness for all our sins (Col. 2:13-15; Eph. 1:7; Rev. 12:10-11; Rom. 8:1, 33-34!). How has Christ conquered Satan? By his active and passive obedience, by making atonement and justification. And now without God's law to condemn us, Satan has no power to accuse us. What truth then will he seek to overthrow with all his might? The truth that the blood of the Lamb saves, the doctrine of penal substitution.

The Lamb slain saves us. The Lamb slain silences Satan's accusations. It is seeing this connection that will stop the pendulum from swinging from penal substitution to Christus Victor. As Henri Blocher argued, in a much neglected essay, these doctrines are seen in the biblical proportions and glory together. It is really Agnus Victor, not what is commonly understood as Christus Victor, that best explains the conquering of Satan.

Rethinking reactionary theology: Reflections on Christus Victor and Penal Substitution

I really enjoyed reading Justin Taylor's interview with Michael Wittmer author of Don't Stop Believing: Why living like Jesus is not enough. There is a review of the book by Tim Challies here. The diagram above fascinated me, and I will look forward to reading the book.

This part of the interview caught my eye:

JT: You write that “The history of theology is a story of pendulum swings. The church pursues one line of thought until it reaches an extreme, and then, like the pendulum on a grandfather clock, swiftly swings to the other side.” Can you give a few examples?

MW: This pendulum swing shows up in nearly every chapter of Don't Stop Believing...We emphasized penal substitution at the exclusion of the other atonement theories (e.g., I don’t remember hearing much about “Christus Victor”). Now some are over-reacting and accepting every theory of the atonement except penal substitution.

When I read this my mind was drawn to the first question of the Heidelberg Catechism (italics added):

What is your only comfort in life and in death?

That I, with body and soul, both in life and in death, am not my own, but belong to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ, who with His precious blood has fully satisfied for all my sins, and redeemed me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, that all things must work together for my salvation. Wherefore, by His Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life, and makes me heartily willing and ready from now on to live unto Him.

The Catechism holds together what Wittmer notes evangelicals have sometimes separated. Why is this?

1. In is to be expected that when a doctrine is under attack not only will there be an appearance of new books and articles defending it, but there is also a mood that one senses at conferences and that you hear in preaching of lines being drawn and sides taken.

• There is the didactic desire to articulate the doctrine under attack clearly, so as to rescue it from misrepresentation.

• There is also the pastoral desire to make sure that our listeners are themselves personally clear about their own understanding and embracing of the doctrine.

• Then there is the polemic and apologetic desire to engage with errors and to win over the wayward and those holding to contrary views.

The net result of this is that there is a perceived emphasis on a particular doctrine that looks very much like an imbalance. This does not mean that there is a real imbalance in the way that one's overall theology is constructed and practiced, but for a time the contested doctrine takes the central place. And the greater the perceived threat the more we should expect this to be the case.

2. A lack of historical awareness is a significant issue. If our main diet of reading is dominated by the most recent books on particular doctrines we will deprive ourselves of access to the centuries of thinking that has preceded those works.

Of course good contemporary books that also deal with important thinkers and controversies in church history can become a significant entry point into the literature of the past. John Stott's The Cross of Christ is a good example of this. Reading this book as an undergraduate introduced me to Anselm's Cur Deus Homo and the aberrant views of Mcleod Campbell, as well as several other figures.

A lack of familiarity with what our forefathers believed and what they rejected is detrimental to the church today. One wonders whether we are better innovators than inheritors.

3. Sinclair Ferguson made the perceptive comment that most listeners to expository preaching would benefit more from it if they had a framework in place, a theological frame of reference, that would help them to understand and better assimilate and retain what they hear.

It should not be lost on us that the Protestant Reformation which unheld the authority, clarity and sufficiency of the Word, also saw a significant emphasis on the need for churches to confess the faith and to catechise members in doctrine, piety and ethics.

The very comprehensiveness and thoroughness of these confessions and catechisms are themselves a safeguard against swinging pendulums. However, a minimalist approach to doctrine arguably builds up the kinetic energy of the pendulum.

How is this related to Penal Substitution and Christus Victor?

The first question of the Heidelberg Catechism views the atoning work of Christ as dealing with the satisfaction made for all our sins (penal substitution) and his redeeming us from all the power of the devil (Christus Victor). When Scripture explicates how Christ conquers the devil, the reality of which is anticipated in the proto-evangelium (Gen. 3:15), it views the power of the devil as the power of deception and accusation. Our legal position before God, in view of Adam's breaking of the covenant of works (Gen. 2:15-17), and our own sins, has rendered us guilty, cursed, and under the sentence of death (Rom. 6:23).

How does Christ redeem us from the power of the devil? By dying for us (1 Peter 3:18). By taking our curse and punishment (Gal. 3:13). By enduring the wrath of God (Rom. 3:25-26). By taking the full penalty of the law (Gal. 3:10).

The legal accusations of Satan are silenced by the blood of the Lamb that has brought us forgiveness for all our sins (Col. 2:13-15; Eph. 1:7; Rev. 12:10-11; Rom. 8:1, 33-34!). How has Christ conquered Satan? By his active and passive obedience, by making atonement and justification. And now without God's law to condemn us, Satan has no power to accuse us. What truth then will he seek to overthrow with all his might? The truth that the blood of the Lamb saves, the doctrine of penal substitution.

The Lamb slain saves us. The Lamb slain silences Satan's accusations. It is seeing this connection that will stop the pendulum from swinging from penal substitution to Christus Victor. As Henri Blocher argued, in a much neglected essay, these doctrines are seen in the biblical proportions and glory together. It is really Agnus Victor, not what is commonly understood as Christus Victor, that best explains the conquering of Satan.

Denying penal substitution

I came across the following comment on the rejection of penal substitution in Hugh Martin's commentary on Jonah first published in 1870. Martin is setting out to show the relationship between Jonah's experience as a type and its fulfilment in the work of Christ:

Now the bringing out of the analogy, in this respect, will be helpful in showing that the death and resurrection of Christ constitute a proper, real, perfect and proven satisfaction to the justice of God for the sins of His people;--a doctrine, which almost all the theological heresies of the present day are, with more or less subtlety and refinement, labouring to overthrow. (Martin, Jonah, Banner of Truth, p. 207)

I find the explanation offered by the late Harold Brown for the presence of the same errors across the centuries and in different cultures compelling: the presence of the same truth tends to produce the same reactions.

I have a brief article on B. B. Warfield's assessment of the flight from penal substitution at the turn of the twentieth century available here.

The Revolt Against Penal Substitution

In his address "Modern Theories of the Atonement," given in 1902, B. B. Warfield observed the revolt against penal substitution that gained momentum in the late nineteenth century. He noted that this revolt prompted an immediate and equally powerful defense. However, "this defense only stemmed the tide, it did not succeed in rolling it back." He wrote:

The ultimate result has been that the revolt from the conceptions of satisfaction, propitiation, expiation, sacrifice, reinforced continually by tendencies adverse to evangelical doctrine peculiar to our times, has grown steadily more and more widespread, and in some quarters more and more extreme, until it has issued in an immense confusion on this central doctrine of the gospel. (p. 286)

Whenever there is a revolt against the particular theological conception of a doctrine, in this case of the cross as a penal substitutionary atonement, one can usually find a concomitant tone of rhetoric that casts that doctrine in as unfavourable a light as possible. And of course one ought to expect to find the promotion of an alternative doctrinal framework also. Warfield made the following judicious statement on the status of penal substitution at the dawn of the twentieth century that is remarkably apropros for today's evangelical scene:

Probably the majority of those who hold the public ear, whether as academical or as popular religious guides, have definitely broken with it, and are commending to their audiences something other and, as they no doubt believe, something very much better. A tone of speech has even grown up regarding it which is not only scornful but positively abusive. There are no epithets too harsh to be applied to it, no invectives too intense to be poured out on it. (p. 287)

As insulting, inappropriate, and offensive a phrase such as "cosmic child abuse" may be, the impulse to verbally deprecate penal substitution is, at least, not a contemporary phenomenon. Nor for that matter are 21st century alternatives to penal substitution anything other than older forms of atonement theology repackaged for a contemporary audience. Again we find that little has changed since Warfield's assessment of "modern theories of the atonement":

Perhaps at no other period was Christ so frequently or so passionately set forth as merely a social Saviour. Certainly at no other period has his work been so prevalently summed up in mere revelation. (p. 284)

The reason for this is surely obvious. The is a direct relationship between our grasp of human need and our understanding of the work that Christ undertook to meet that need. If we conceive of our deepest need as one of being in state of error, or ignorance, a state exacerbated by our wayward living, then we will see Christ largely, if not exclusively, as a teacher and example. Warfield neatly summarizes this tendency as follows:

The fact is, the views men take of the atonement are largely determined by their fundamental feelings of need--by what men most long to be saved from. (p. 283)

This straightforward insight tells us something very significant about the present status and future of penal substitution. Even though, in the last fifty years, we have had many able defenders of penal substitution (from Leon Morris, Roger Nicole, Jim Packer, John Stott, down to the recent volume Pierced For Our Transgressions) we are warranted in repeating Warfield's conclusion for our own day, "this defense only stemmed the tide, it did not succeed in rolling it back." The doctrine of penal substitution has not been lacking the most able of academic and popular defenders, but this defense has yet to win the day.

The preservation and future success of penal substitution is a supernatural work. Only God can uncover the appalling need we stand in for a Saviour to give his life in place of ours, only God can so convict of sin and guilt that we will flee to Christ for refuge, only God can give faith to turn from ourselves and to look to Christ crucified in our place according to the testimony of the Scriptures.

The outcome of the 21st century revolt against penal substitution will not bypass the need for solid exegetical and theological books on the subject, but it will require more than this. It will require the kind of experiential grasp of sin and salvation, produced by the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts through the Word, that Warfield described so powerfully:

If we have not much sin to be saved from, why, certainly, a very little atonement will suffice for our needs. It is, after all, only the sinner who requires a Saviour. But if we are sinners, and in proportion as we know ourselves to be sinners, we will cry out for that Saviour who only after he was perfected by suffering could become the Author of eternal salvation. (p. 297)

[All quotations are from "Modern Theories of the Atonement," in The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield vol. IX Studies in Theology]

A Scandalous Attack on the Cross: an article from the archives

I wrote this article in the Autumn/Fall of 2004 for the Evangelical Magazine (a publication of the EMW). The italicised blurb below is not mine but comes from the Banner of Truth website and gives a little context for non-UK readers. It is also available at Monergism.com (that world class theological resource). I also did an interview on this issue with Cedarville Radio, Ohio, that is available here when I was privileged to work for UCCF (there are a couple on inaccuracies in the interview, I did not attend the debate nor organise it).


A public debate organised by the Evangelical Alliance took place on 7 October in Emmanuel Centre, London following strong criticism from Christians of Steve Chalke’s book, “The Lost Message of Jesus” (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003). 600 people attended, indicating the strength of feeling that the book’s message had aroused. Steve Chalke’s supporters laughed at his amusing remarks and applauded him vigorously when he had made his presentation. The two who spoke against his beliefs were Simon Gathercole, lecturer in New Testament at Aberdeen and Anna Robbins, lecturer in Theology and Contemporary Culture at the London School of Theology. Chalke was supported by Stewart Williams, chair of the Anabaptist network.

Martin Downes the UCCF team leader in Wales explains the error of Chalke’s ideas in an article in the September/October 2004 Evangelical Magazine writing as follows.

A Scandalous Attack on the Cross

The doctrine of penal substitution affirms that on the cross Jesus exchanged places with sinners, and voluntarily bore the punishment that their sins deserved, thereby propitiating an angry God. It is a defining belief of evangelical faith, biblically warranted and central to the gospel. Why then is the Evangelical Alliance hosting a debate where penal substitution is being attacked by a well known evangelical?

What is the debate about?

Steve Chalke asks how we have ‘come to believe that at the cross this God of love suddenly decides to vent his anger and wrath on his own Son?' (p.182). Chalke considers this to be a mockery of Jesus' teaching about refusing to repay evil with evil and a contradiction of the statement that God is love (p.182). He insists that the cross isn't 'a form of cosmic child abuse - a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed' (p.182). Instead the cross is a symbol of love, a demonstration of how far God is willing to go to prove his love (p.182).

He claims that we have fundamentally misunderstood Jesus' cry of dereliction, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' (Matt. 27:46). Rather than the sight of Jesus taking the world's sin on Himself being unbearable for a holy God, Jesus' feeling of abandonment ‘mirrors those of countless millions of people who suffer oppression, enslavement, abuse, disease, poverty, starvation and violence’ (p.185). Calvary wasn't unique. For Jesus the cross became a way of sharing the experience of all who feel abandoned by God in their suffering. The reality, however, is that God is always right there with us in our suffering (p.185-6).

Steve Chalke no longer preaches penal substitution (p.184), but he still believes that preaching the cross is central. ‘On the cross Jesus took on the ideology that violence is the ultimate solution by "turning the other cheek" and refusing to return evil for evil, willingly absorbing its impact within his own body’ (p.179). The resurrection is the reversal of this, the triumph of love over hate, as the God of love takes on the powers of darkness and wins (p.l87).

In a press release Steve Chalke has said that penal substitution is ‘a theory rooted in violence and retributive notions of justice’ and is incompatible ‘at least as currently taught and understood, with any authentically Christian understanding of the character of God.’ He is unrepentant about referring to the doctrine as a version of ‘cosmic child abuse’ because 'it is a stark "unmasking" of the violent, pre-Christian thinking behind such a theology'.

Recovering the truth about God's character?

Chalke considers it a tragedy that Church history has obscured the centrality of God's love. He asserts that the Bible 'never defines God as anger, power or judgement-in fact it never defines him as anything other than love' (p.63). Moreover, he argues, to think of God's attributes without reference to the primary lens of his love 'is to risk a terrible misrepresentation of his character, which in turn leads to a distortion of the gospel' (p.63).

Even texts that speak of God's holiness should be understood as portraying the love that makes God different rather than his sinless purity and 'otherness' (p.58-9). But God is described in the Bible as light (1 John 1:5) and Spirit (John 4:24). Moreover both Testaments affirm that God is a consuming fire (Deut. 4:24; Heb. 12:29), and dwells in unapproachable light (1 Tim.6:16). The sight of God's holiness filled Isaiah with dread and made him conscious of his guilt (Isa. 6:1-5). Christians are called to holiness not impurity (1 Thess. 4:7). This confusion of God's attributes of holiness and love is not just a basic error; it appears to be an intentional misrepresentation to serve his own agenda.

How does he reconcile the frequent occurrences of judgment in the Bible with love as God's defining characteristic? This is his answer:

“Yahweh's association with vengeance and violence wasn't so much an expression of who he was but the result of his determination to be involved with his world. His unwillingness to distance himself from the people of Israel and their actions meant that at times he was implicated in the excessive acts of war that we see in some of the books of the Old Testament.” (p.49).

According to Steve Chalke the conquest of Canaan was done in God's name but not at His command or with His consent. This is directly contrary to Deut. 7:1-2,16, 20, 22-26; 9:1-3; Jos.6:15-21; 10:40-42.

A Blatant Contradiction

All this begs the question, is it ever appropriate on this understanding of God's love, to speak of his anger and judgment? But the following admission is telling:

“Although God is love, this doesn't exclude the possibility of him eventually acting in judgement... if God is love, then anger is a legitimate, indeed intrinsic, expression of that love. But because God's anger is born of pure love, it is never fickle or malicious” (p.62).

But this entirely undermines his argument. For if there is no final conflict between love and judgment, one wonders why at the cross God cannot demonstrate His anger at our sin, and, at the same time, manifest His love? Is God angry just because we reject His love or is He angry at all deviations from His nature and will? How can God forgive us and uphold His justice?

Steve Chalke is caught in a contradiction. He wants to affirm God's anger in some sense, but is intent on redefining God's holiness and downplaying the seriousness of sin (p. 173). Nevertheless he is right to say that anger is a legitimate expression of God's love. Because the Lord is righteous He loves righteousness and hates the wicked (Psalm 5:4-5; 11:5, 7). The Bible speaks plainly about God's anger against all sin being expressed in the present and at the day of judgment (Rom. 1:18ff, 2:5-11; Eph. 5:3-6).

God's love is not a moral weakness. If sin ought to be punished then there is nothing in God that impels Him to leave it unpunished. If God loves sinners then some way must be found for His justice to be satisfied as well.

Where Wrath and Mercy Meet

Is it true that penal substitution contradicts the statement that God is love? If it is then the New Testament writers were not aware of it. Paul tells us that the God who justifies those who believe, by his grace, does so by setting forth His Son as a propitiation (Rom. 3:25). The writer to the Hebrews says that it was as a merciful High Priest that Jesus made propitiation for the sins of the people (Heb. 2:17).

The apostle John tells us that God is both light (1 John 1:5) and love (3:16). 'In this is love', writes John, 'not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins' (4:10). On the basis of this wrath-averting death Jesus acts as our advocate with the Father when we sin (2:1-2). Rather than being incompatible with love, God's love saves sinners from His own wrath through the death of Christ (Rom. 5:8-9).

Vengeance Is Mine

By pitting Jesus' teaching about not 'repaying evil for evil' against the idea of penal substitution Steve Chalke makes a basic but telling mistake. Consider Romans 12:17, 19: 'Repay no one evil for evil... Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, "Vengeance Is mine, I will repay, says the Lord"'. Retribution belongs to the righteous Judge not to private individuals. But the state is given the limited remit to punish wrongdoers, 'For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer' (Rom. 13:4).

Why the debate is a scandal

Let us make no mistake; this debate is due to Steve Chalke's fame and not to the worth of his argument. His writing is logically flawed, arbitrary, reliant on emotional language, and highly selective in its use of Scripture. To brand penal substitution as ‘cosmic child abuse’ is heretical and blasphemous. This badly chosen phrase portrays God as committing unspeakable evil. We are left with no confidence in the sub-Christian Old Testament revelation or in God's dealings with Israel. It is an embarrassment that this ill-conceived theology should be given such public prominence. Steve Chalke has dressed up old-fashioned liberalism in twenty-first century dress. He has certainly abandoned the evangelical gospel. J. Gresham Machen's words are appropriate:

'They (liberal preachers) speak with disgust of those who believe ‘that the blood of our Lord, shed in substitutionary death, placates an alienated deity and makes possible welcome for the returning sinner. Against the doctrine of the cross they use every weapon of caricature and vilification. Thus they pour out their scorn upon a thing so holy and so precious that in the presence of it the Christian heart melts in gratitude too deep for words. It never seems to occur to modern liberals that in deriding the Christian doctrine of the cross, they are trampling on human hearts.”

(J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1923, p.120.)

Fact, "theory" and penal substitution: Machen on the meaning of the cross

It is impossible to think about the death of Jesus without holding to an interpretation of the meaning of his death. At a very crude level, our interpretation of it will either be natural or supernatural, it will limit the horizon of explanation to the actions of men or it will include along with the actions of men the plan and purpose of God.

Having made this choice we are then faced with either a divinely given interpretation, which we must then receive, or an interpretation (or set of interpretations) that are coloured by our cultural situation. If the latter, then the doctrine of the atonement alters its meaning over time.

What we cannot avoid is having an explanation of the meaning of the cross at all. The moment that we contemplate this death we are confronted with words like "Christ," "sin," "atonement," "for," and even "death" itself. These words convey to us the meaning of the cross.

The following lengthy extract if from Gresham Machen's What is Faith? The passing of time has not altered the relevance of his observations. The tendency for man to separate what God has joined together, fact and theory, event and explanation, is still very much with us. Machen's takes this dangerous distinction to the woodshed:

We can have the fact of the atonement, it is said, no matter what particular theory of it we hold, and indeed even without holding any particular theory of it at all. So this substitutionary view, it is said, is after all only one theory among many.

This objection is based upon a mistaken view of the distinction between fact and theory, and upon a somewhat ambiguous use of the word "theory." What is meant by a "theory"? Undoubtedly the word often has rather an unfavourable sound; and the use of it in the present connection might seem to imply that the view of the atonement which is designated as a "theory" is a mere effort of man to explain in his own way what God has given.

But might not God have revealed the "theory" of a thing just as truly as the thing itself; might he not himself have given the explanation when he gave the thing? In that case the explanation just as much as the thing itself comes to us with divine authority, and it is impossible to accept one without accepting the other.

We have not yet, however, quite penetrated to the heart of the matter. Men say that they will accept the fact of the atonement without accepting the substitutionary theory of it, and indeed without being sure of any theory of it at all.

The trouble with this attitude is that the moment we say "atonement" we have already overstepped the line that separates fact from theory; an "atonement," even in the most general and most indefinite sense that could conceivably be given to the word, cannot possibly be a mere fact, but is a fact as explained by its purpose and result...What we have really done is to designate the event with an explanation of its meaning.

It is impossible for us to obtain the slightest benefit from a mere contemplation of the death of Christ; all the benefit comes from from our knowledge of the meaning of that death, or in other words (if the term be used in a high sense) from our "theory" of it.

If, therefore, we speak of the bare "fact" of the atonement, as distinguished from the "theory" of it, we are indulging in a misleading use of of words; the bare fact is the death, and the moment we say "atonement" we have committed ourselves to a theory [MD: we are committed to a theory when we say death]. The important thing, then, is, since we must have some theory, that the particular theory that we hold shall be correct.

Gresham Machen, What is Faith?, p. 145-6

The Defense of Penal Substitution

John Owen stands out as one of the greatest defenders of penal substitutionary atonement in the history of the church. His writings on this are a largely untapped resource that would serve us well as, once more, penal substitution has been subject to a withering assault on exegetical, theological, moral and historical grounds.

It is, however, doubtful whether any of today's deniers of penal substitution could match the malevolent impact made by Faustus Socinus' De Jesu Christo Servatore (written in 1578, published in 1594). The work can be read in Dutch and Latin but has never been translated into English. Packer has the following comment on it in his classic 1973 lecture What did the cross achieve? The logic of penal substitution (if you have never read this brilliant piece it is available here):

What the Reformers did was to redefine satisfactio (satisfaction), the main medieval category for thought about the cross. Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo?, which largely determined the mediaeval development, saw Christ’s satisfactio for our sins as the offering of compensation or damages for dishonour done, but the Reformers saw it as the undergoing of vicarious punishment (poena) to meet the claims on us of God’s holy law and wrath (i.e. his punitive justice).

What Socinus did was to arraign this idea as irrational, incoherent, immoral and impossible. Giving pardon, he argued, does not square with taking satisfaction, nor does the transferring of punishment from the guilty to the innocent square with justice; nor is the temporary death of one a true substitute for the eternal death of many; and a perfect substitutionary satisfaction, could such a thing be, would necessarily confer on us unlimited permission to continue in sin.

Socinus’ alternative account of New Testament soteriology, based on the axiom that God forgives without requiring any satisfaction save the repentance which makes us forgivable, was evasive and unconvincing, and had little influence. But his classic critique proved momentous: it held the attention of all exponents of the Reformation view for more than a century, and created a tradition of rationalistic prejudice against that view which has effectively shaped debate about it right down to our own day.

Many of the arguments put forward by Socinus have resurfaced again and again in history when penal substitution has been under attack. Of Socinus' book Owen said that it was written with the greatest strength, subtilty, and plausibility of all of the productions that came from him and his followers.

Owen's counsel on the defense of the atonement is worth pondering:

I dare boldly acquaint the younger students in these weighty points of the religion of Jesus Christ, that the truth of this one particular, concerning the eternal justice of God indispensably requiring the punishment of sin, being well established...will securely carry them through all the sophisms of their adversaries, and cut all the knots which, with so much subtilty, they endeavour to tie and cast upon the doctrine of the satisfaction of Christ.

John Owen, Vindicae Evangelicae, p. 28