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.

Meet the Ancestors part 1: the 17th century roots of 21st century errors

Even though there appears to be a bewildering and endless variety of errors in the Church in actual fact many of them are revived forms of past theological deviancies. Furthermore, once you reject orthodoxy there is in fact a limited number of places where you can go in forming innovative ideas. Chances are that someone else has been there before and beaten you to it. By good and necessary consequence this also pays testimony to the stability of orthodoxy over that same period.

Even allowing for differences of time and place, and variances in sociological, philosophical and cultural influences, there is a remarkable consistency in the similarity of errors in Church history. I think that an obvious explanation for this is the presence of the same biblical text and the same theological truths that were the cause of reaction, aversion and innovation. If you don't like the truth you have got to go somewhere. As the late Harold O. J. Brown observed it really was the same truths producing the same reactions again and again.

This has happened with open theism and with the current attacks upon penal substitution within evangelicalism. My thesis is not that ideas from the past have been transfered directly from the seventeenth century writings of the Socinians but that the affinity between their views and the fresh contemporary attacks upon God's exhaustive foreknowledge and the atonement that one finds in open theist writings and in the emerging church movement, for example, have been indirectly produced by the same flight from orthodoxy.

Over the next few months I will be researching and writing a chapter for a book that Crossway will be publishing with the provisional title "Christless Christianity: The shadow of Socinianism falls on Western Evangelicalism." My contention is that the same hermeneutical and theological moves are afoot today, in the doctrinal aberrations that afflict the cause of the gospel, that troubled churches in the past.

Once revived these ideas find their ways into books with shiny new covers, sermons, seminars, songs, prayers, minds and hearts. Like Socinianism they too become international movements that stray from the gospel and take more and more people with them.

As an example of this Robert Strimple, in his 1996 essay "What does God know?" noted that open theism is a direct descendent of Socinianism:

Against the Arminians, the Socinians insisted that logically the Calvinists were quite correct in insisting that the only real basis for believing that God knows what you are going to do next is to believe that he has foreordained what you are going to do next. How else could God know ahead of time what your decision will be?

Like the Arminians, however, the Socinians insisted that it was a contradiction of human freedom to believe in the sovereign foreordination of God. So they went "all the way" (logically) and denied not only that God has foreordained the free decisions of free agents but also that God foreknows what those decisions will be.

That is precisely the teaching of the "free will theism" of Pinnock, Rice, and other like-minded "new model evangelicals." They want their doctrine of God to sound very "new," very modern...But it is just the old Socinian heresy rejected by the church centuries ago.

Rober Strimple, "What Does God Know?" in John H. Armstrong [ed.], The Coming Evangelical Crisis, p. 140-1

I'll take up this point over the next few days with examples from John Owen's critique of Socinian views in general, and John Biddle in particular. Biddle had written of God "not knowing the things that are future and which shall be done by the sons of men" (Owen, Vindicae Evangelicae, p. 86).