What Is Penal Substitution?

Home , Bound for Glory (2019), Christus Victor, Morna Hooker, Penal substitution

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Editorial Director: Jonathan Leeman Editor: Sam Emadi Managing Editor: Alex Duke Layout: Rubner Durais Cover Design: OpenBox9 Production Manager: Rick Denham & Mary Beth Freeman 9Marks President: Mark Dever Contents

Editor’s Note 5 What Did the Cross Achieve? 8 Four Questions to Ask about the Atonement 57 What Is Penal Substitution? 63 Did Jesus Affirm Penal Substitutionary Atonement? 68 20 Quotes from It Is Well: Expositions on Substitutionary Atonement 75 Answering 4 Common Objections to PSA 81 Does Penal Substitutionary Atonement Rupture the Trinity? 89 Nothing To Be Ashamed Of 96 Did the Church Fathers Affirm Penal Substitutionary Atonement? 105 How Does Penal Substitution Relate to Other Atonement Theories? 110 Lose Particular Redemption, Lose Penal Substitution 117 How Does the Cross of Christ Make Sense of the Kingdom of God? 122 The Love Story of Penal Substitutionary Atonement 131 God of the Cross: 5 Recommended Books on the Atonement 136 Pastoring Abuse Sufferers with the Doctrine of Penal Substitutionary Atonement 142 The Necessity of Penal Substitution for Suffering Saints 153 Why Penal Substitutionary Atonement Matters for Counseling 159 How to Explain Covenantal Headship to Your Members 163 Explaining Penal Substitutionary Atonement in our Personal Evangelism 167 How Charles Finney (and other Overly Emotional Preachers) Made It Difficult to Preach the Gospel 174 Ten Atonement Songs You Should Consider Singing 179 Don’t Assume It Or You’ll Lose It 184 On the Inexhaustible Riches of Preaching Christ and Him Crucified 187 Editor’s Note

Jonathan Leeman

ew doctrines are more beautiful than penal substitution. To behold it is to stare into the Godhead itself. F Penal substitution shows us a God who is three in one. Only by the Trinity could God absorb the wrath of God—what John Stott calls the self-substitution of God. It shows us the simplicity of God. Penal substitution affirms that God’s love cannot be separated from his justice and his justice cannot be separated from his love, his holiness from his goodness and his goodness from his holiness. It shows us the self-sufficiency of God. Christ can undertake to pay our penalty and count that transfer of guilt as just because the moral law of the universe is his law. It is not outside of him but is the expression of his own character. Penal substitution shows us the love of God and the nature of that love. When he stands in our place, he makes a covenantal vow, like Adam declaring “Her bone is now my bone; her flesh is now my flesh.” Only Christ says, “Her sin is now my sin; my righteousness is now her righteousness.” His love is love for a bride—not a pristine one, but one who has played the whore.

5 It shows us the righteousness and justice of God. Other theories of the atonement leave some injustices—at least those of the saved—unpunished, unaccounted for. Yet penal substitution insists that every sin and injustice must be punished, so just and righteous is our God. It says to the victim, “Every injustice will be addressed,” and to the sinner, “He will show his justice in your salvation if you belong to him. He cannot forsake himself.” It shows us the holiness of God, meaning the atonement is wholly consecrated to him. God is the ultimate focus of Christ’s death. He is its subject and object. It is from him and through him and to him, sweeping us up into the arch of its swirl. Penal substitution is good news for those who have hurt and those who have been hurt. It speaks to the oppressor and the oppressed. It reveals God as the wisest and the humblest. Who else would have conquered kingdoms through a cross, stooped low to raise others up, created life out of death? And yet, amidst this beauty and glory, our world and our sin conspire to render penal substitution nonsensical, knocking out every conceptual buttress. The world teaches us to measure morality in relation to ourselves, leaving no room for the holiness of God. It says we are bound only by standards or laws that we create or consent to, leaving no space for the judgment of God. We define love by whatever is most conducive to self-discovery and self-expression, and so reject the Son-exalting love of God. We believe that truth and goodness is found only by looking inward, and so reject our need for the vicarious righteousness of God. On every front the Evil One has placed roadblocks to comprehension and belief of this sacred doctrine. Therefore, to enjoy the glory and to wage the battle, 9Mar- ks devotes this Journal to penal substitutionary atonement. Speaking personally, working through each of these articles has edified my soul and fortified my faith. The theological and

6 practical meditations alike should create a joy which you will want to share, like the woman who has found her lost coin. We commend to you every piece. Read them with a spouse or a friend, your fellow elders or members. As the hymn invites,

Come behold the wondrous mystery Christ the Lord upon the tree In the stead of ruined sinners Hangs the Lamb in victory See the price of our redemption See the Father’s plan unfold Bringing many sons to glory Grace unmeasured, love untold (From Come Behold the Wondrous Mystery, by Matt Boswell, Michael Bleecker, Matt Papa 2013)

7 What Did the Cross Achieve?

THE LOGIC OF PENAL SUBSTITUTION

J. I. PACKER

he task which I have set myself in this lecture is to focus and explicate a belief which, by and large, is a distinguishing mark Tof the word-wide evangelical fraternity: namely, the belief that the cross had the character of penal substitution, and that it was in virtue of this fact that it brought salvation to mankind. Two considerations prompt my attempt. First, the significance of penal substitution is not always stated as exactly as is desirable, so that the idea often gets misunderstood and caricatured by its critics; and I should like, if I can, to make such misunderstanding more difficult. Second, I am one of those who believe that this notion takes us to the very heart of the Christian gospel, and I welcome the opportunity of commending my conviction by analysis and argument. My plan is this: first, to clear up some questions of method, so that there will be no doubt as to what I am doing; to explore what it means to call Christ’s death substitutionary; third, to see what further meaning is added when Christ’s substitutionary suffering

8 is called penal; fourth, to note in closing that the analysis offered is not out of harmony with learned exegetical opinion. These are, I believe, needful preliminaries to any serious theological estimate of this view.

I. MYSTERY AND MODEL Every theological question has behind it a history of study, and narrow eccentricity in handling it is unavoidable unless the history is taken into account. Adverse comment on the concept of penal substitution often betrays narrow eccentricity or this kind. The two main historical points relating to this idea are, first, that Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Melanchthon and their reforming contemporaries were the pioneers in stating it and, second, that the arguments brought against it in 1578 by the Unitarian Pelagian, Faustus Socinus, in his brilliant polemic De Jesu Christo Servato- re (Of Jesus Christ the Saviour) 1 have been central in discussion of it ever since. What the Reformers did was to redefine satisfactio (satisfaction), the main mediaeval 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 continua in sin. Socinus’ alternative account of New Testament soteriology, based on the axiom that God forgi-

9 ves 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. The almost mesmeric effect of Socinus’ critique on Reformed scholastics in particular was on the whole unhappy. It forced them to develop rational strength in stating and connecting up the various parts of their position, which was good, but it also led them to fight back on the challenger’s own ground, using the Socinian technique of arguing a priori about God as if he were a man - to be precise, a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century monarch, head of both the legislature and the judiciary in his own realm but bound nonetheless to respect existing law and judicial practice at every point. So the God of Calvary came to he presented in a whole series of expositions right down to that of Louis Berkhof (1938) as successfully avoiding all the moral and legal lapses which Socinus claimed to find in the Reformation view. 2 But these demonstra- tions, however skilfully done (and demonstrators like Francis Tu- rretin and Hodge, to name but two, 3 were very skilful indeed), had builtin weaknesses. Their stance was defensive rather than declaratory, analytical and apologetic rather than doxological and kerygmatic. They made the word of the cross sound more like a conundrum than a confession of faith - more like a puzzle, we might say, than a gospel. What was happening? Just this: that in trying to beat Socinian rationalism at its own game, Reformed theologians were conceding the Socinian assumption that every aspect of God’s work of reconciliation will be exhaustively explicable in terms of a natural theology of divine government, drawn from the world of contemporary legal and political thought. Thus, in their zeal to show themselves rational, they became rationalistic. 4 Here

10 as elsewhere, methodological rationalism became in the seventeenth century a worm in the Reformed bud, leading in the next two centuries to a large-scale withering of its theological flower. Now I do not query the substantial rightness of the Reformed view of the atonement; on the contrary, I hope to confirm it, as will appear; but I think it is vital that we should unambiguously renounce any such intellectual method as that which I have described, and look for a better one. I shall now try to commend what seems to me a sounder method by offering answers to two questions: (1) What sort of knowledge of Christ’s achievement on the cross is open to us? (2) From what source and by what means do we gain it? (1) What sort of knowledge of God’s action in Christ’s death may we have? That a man named Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate about AD 30 is common historical knowledge, but Christian beliefs about his divine identity and the significance of his dying cannot be deduced from that fact alone. What further sort of knowledge about the cross, then, may Christians enjoy? The answer, we may say, is faith-knowledge: by faith we know that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Yes, indeed; but what sort of knowledge is faith-knowledge? It is a kind of knowledge of which God is both giver and content. It is a Spirit-given acquaintance with divine realities, given through acquaintance with God’s word. It is a kind of knowledge which makes the knower say in one and the same breath both ‘whereas I was blind, now I see’ (Jn 9:25) and also ‘now we see as in a mirror, darkly . . . now I know in part’ (1 Cor 13:12). For it is a unique kind of knowledge which, though real, is not full; it is knowledge of what is discernible within a circle of light against the background of a larger darkness; it is, in short, knowledge of a mystery, the mystery of the living God at work. ‘Mystery’ is used here as it was by Charles Wesley when he wrote:

11 ‘Tis mystery all! The immortal dies! Who can explore his strange design? In vain the first-born seraph tries To sound the depths of love divine!

‘Mystery’ in the sense (traditional in theology) means a reality distinct from us which in our very apprehending of it remains unfathomable to us: a reality which we acknowledge as actual without knowing how it is possible, and which we therefore describe as incomprehensible, Christian metaphysicians, moved by wonder at the world, speak of the created order as ‘imagery’, meaning that there is more to it, and more of God in it, than they can grasp; and similarly Christian theologians, taught by revelation, apply the same word, for parallel reasons to the self-revealed and self-revealing God, and to his work of reconciliation and redemption through Christ. It will be seen that this definition of mystery corresponds less to Paul’s use of the word mustarion (which be applied to the open secret of God’s saving purpose, set forth in the gospel) than to his prayer that the Ephesians might ‘know the love of Christ which passes knowledge’ (Eph 3:19). Knowing through divine enlightenment that which passes knowledge is precisely what it means to be acquainted with the mystery of God. The revealed ‘mystery’ (in Paul’s sense) of Christ confronts us with the unfathomable ‘mystery’ (in the sense I defined) of the Crea- tor who exceeds the comprehension of his creatures. Accordingly, Paul ends his full-dress, richest-ever exposition of the mystery of Christ by crying: ‘O depth of wealth, wisdom, and knowledge in God! How unsearchable his judgments, how untraceable his ways! Who knows the mind of the Lord?. . .Source, Guide and Goal of all that is - to him to be glory for ever ! Amen’ (Rom 11:33ff., NEB). Here Paul shows, and shares, his awareness that the God of Jesus remains the God of Job, and that the highest wisdom of the theological theorist, even when working under divine

12 inspiration as Paul did, is to recognise that he is, as it were, gazing into the sun, whose very brightness makes it impossible for him fully to see it; so that at the end of the day he has to admit that God has much more to him than theories can ever contain, and to humble himself in adoration before the one whom he can never fully analyse. Now the atonement is a mystery in the defined sense, one aspect of the total mystery of God. But it does not stand alone in this. Every aspect of God’s reality and work, without exception, is mystery. The eternal Trinity; God’s sovereignty in creation, providence, and grace; the incarnation, exaltation, present reign and approaching return of Jesus Christ; the inspiring of the Holy Scriptures; and the ministry of the Spirit in the Christian and the Church - each of these (to look no further) is a reality beyond our full fathoming, just as the cross is. And theories about any of these things which used human analogies to dispel the dimension of mystery would deserve our distrust, just as rationalistic theories about the cross do. It must be stressed that the mystery is in each case the reality itself, as distinct from anything in our apprehension of it, and as distinct therefore from our theories, problems, affirmations and denials about it. What makes it a mystery is that creatures like ourselves can comprehend it only in part. To say this does not open the door to scepticism, for our knowledge of divine realities (like our knowledge of each other) is genuine knowledge expressed in notions which, so far as they go, are true. But it does close the door against rationalism, in the sense of theorizing that claims to explain with finality any aspect of God’s way of existing and working. And with that, it alerts us to the fact that the presence in our theology of unsolved problems is not necessarily a reflec- tion on the truth or adequacy of our thoughts. Inadequate and untrue theories do of course exist: a theory (the word comes from theorein, to look at) is a ‘view’ or ‘sight’ of something, and if one’s

13 way of looking at it is perverse one’s view will be distorted, and distorted views are always full of problems. But the mere presence of problems is not enough to prove a view distorted; true views in theology also entail unsolved problems, while any view that was problem-free would certainly be rationalistic and reductionist. True theories in theology, whether about the atonement or anything else, will suspect themselves of being inadequate to their object throughout. One thing that Christians know by faith is that they know only in part. None of this, of course, is new or unfamiliar; it all belongs to the main historic stream of Christian thought. But I state it here, perhaps too laboriously, because it has not always been brought to bear rigorously enough on the doctrine of the atonement. Also, this position has linguistic implications which touch the doctrine of the atonement in ways which are not always fully grasped; and my next task is to show what these are. Human knowledge and thoughts arc expressed in words, and what we must note now is that all attempts to speak of the mystery of the unique and transcendent God involve many kind; of stretching of ordinary language. We say, for instance that God is both plural and singular, being three in one; that he directs and determines the free acts of men; that he is wise, good and sovereign, when he allows Christians to starve or die of cancer; that the divine Son has always upheld the universe, even when he was human baby; and so forth. At first sight, such statements might appear nonsensical (either meaningless or false). But Christians say that, though they would be nonsensical if made of men, they are true as statements about God. If so, however, it is clear that the key words are not being used in an everyday way. Whatever our views on the origins of human language and the inspiration of the Scriptures (both matters on which it seems that options are currently being broadened rather than reduced), there can be no dispute that the meaning of all the nouns, adjectives and verbs

14 that we use for stating facts and giving descriptions is anchored, at least in the first instance, in our experience of knowing things and people (ourselves included) in this world. Ordinary language is thus being adapted for an extraordinary purpose when we use it to speak of God. Christians have always made this adaptation easily in their prayers, praises and proclamations, as if it were a natural thing to do (as indeed I think it is), and the doubts articulated by living if somewhat old-fashioned philosophers like A. J. Ayer and Antony Flew as to whether such utterance expresses knowledge and conveys information about anything more than private attitudes seem curiously provincial as well as paradoxical. 5 Moreover, it is noticeable that the common Christian verbal forms for expressing divine mysteries have from the first shown remarkable consistency and steadiness in maintaining their builtin logical strangeness, as if the apprehended reality of God was itself sustaining them (as indeed I think it was). Language about the cross illustrates this clearly: liturgies, hymns and literature, homiletical, catechetical and apologetic, all show that Christians have from the start lived by faith in Christ’s death as a sacrifice made to God in reparation for their sins, however uncouth and mythological such talk sounds (and must always have sounded), however varied the presentations of atonement which teachers tried out, and however little actual theologizing about the cross went on in particular periods, especially the early centuries. 6 Christian language, with its peculiarities, has been much studied during the past twenty years, and two things about it have become clear, First, all its odd, ‘stretched’, contradictory and incoherent-sounding features derive directly from the unique Christian notion of the transcendent, tripersonal Creator-God. Christians regard God as free from the limits that bind creatures like ourselves, who bear God’s image while not existing on his level, and Christian language, following biblical precedent, shakes free from ordinary limits in a way that reflects this fact. So, for

15 instance, faced with John’s declaration in 1 John 4:8-10, ‘God is love. . . . Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins,’ Calvin can write without hesitation: ‘The word propitiation (placatio; Greek, hilasmos) has great weight: for God, in a way that cannot be put into words (ineffabili quodam modo), at the very time when he loved us, was hostile (infensus) to us till he was reconciled in Christ.’ 7 Calvin›s phrase ‹in a way that cannot be put into words› is his acknowledgement that the mystery of God is beyond our grasp. To Calvin, this duality of attitude, love and hostility, which in human psychological terms is inconceivable, is part of God›s moral glory; a sentiment which might make rationalistic theologians shake their heads, but at which John certainly would have nodded his. Second, Christian speech verbalizes the apprehended mystery of God by using a distinctive non-representational ‘picture-language’. This consists of parables, analogies, metaphors and images piled up in balance with each other, as in the Bible itself (from which this language is first learned), and all pointing to the reality of God’s presence and action in order to evoke awareness of it and response to it. Analysis of the functioning of this language is currently in full swing, 8 and no doubt much remains to be said. Already, however, the discussion has produced one firm result of major importance - the recognition that the verbal units of Christian speech are ‹models›, comparable to the thought-models of modern physics. 9 The significance of this appears from John MacIntyre’s judgment ‘that the theory of models succeeds in reinstating the doctrine of analogy in modern theological logic . . . and that analogy is to be interpreted in terms of a theory of models and not vice versa.’ 10 The doctrine of analogy is the time-harboured account, going back to Aquinas, of how ordinary language is used to speak intelligibly of a God who is partly like us (because we bear his image) and partly unlike us (because he is the infinite Creator while we are finite crea-

16 tures). 11 All theological models, like the non-descriptive models of the physical sciences, have an analogical character; they are, we might say, analogies with a purpose, thought-patterns which function in a particular way, teaching us to focus one area of reality (relationships with God) by conceiving of it in terms of another, better known area of reality (relationships with each other). Thus they actually inform us about our relationship with God and through the Holy Spirit enable us to unify, clarify and intensify our experience in that relationship. The last song in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream- coat assures us that ‘any dream will do’ to wake the weary into joy. Will any model do to give knowledge of the living God? Histori- cally, Christians have not thought so. Their characteristic theological method, whether practised clumsily or skilfully, consistently or inconsistently, has been to take biblical models as their God-given starting-point, to base their belief-system on what biblical writers use these models to say, and to let these models operate as ‘controls’, both suggesting and delimiting what further, secon- dary models may be developed in order to explicate these which are primary. As models in physics are hypotheses formed under the suggestive control of empirical evidence to correlate and pre- dict phenomena, so Christian theological models are explanatory constructs formed to help us know, understand and deal with God, the ultimate reality. From this standpoint, the whole study of Christian theology, biblical, historical and systematic, is the exploring of a three-tier hierarchy of models: first, the ‘control’ models given in Scripture (God, Son of God, kingdom of God, word of God, love of God, glory of God, body of Christ, justification, adoption, redemption, new birth and so forth - in short, all the concepts analysed in Kittel’s great Worterbuch and its many epi- goni) next, dogmatic models which the church crystallized out to define and defend the faith (homoousion, Trinity, nature, hypos- tatic union, double procession, sacrament, supernatural, etc. - in

17 short, all the concepts usually dealt with in doctrinal textbooks); finally, interpretive models lying between Scripture and defined dogma which particular theologians and theological schools developed for stating the faith to contemporaries (penal substitution, verbal inspiration, divinization, Barth’s ‘Nihil’ - das Nichtige - and many more). It is helpful to think of theology in these terms, and of the atonement in particular. Socinus went wrong in this matter first by identifying the biblical model of God’s kingship with his own sixteenth-century monarchy model (a mistake later repeated by Hugo Grotius), second by treating this not-wholly-biblical model as his ‘control’, and third by failing to acknowledge that the mystery of God is more than any one model, even the best, can express. We have already noticed that some orthodox writers answering So- cinus tended to slip in a similar way. The passion to pack God into a conceptual box of our own making is always strong, but must be resisted. If we bear in mind that all the knowledge we can have of the atonement is of a mystery about which we can only think and speak by means of models, and which remain a mystery when all is said and done, it will keep us from rationalistic pitfalls and thus help our progress considerably.

II. BIBLE AND MODEL (2) Now we come up to our second question, my answer to which has been hinted at already. By what means is knowledge of the mystery of the cross given us? I reply: through the didactic thought-models given in the Bible, which in truth are instruction, from God. In other words, I proceed on the basis of the mainstream Christian belief in biblical inspiration, which I have sought to justify elsewhere. 12 What this belief means, in formula terms, is that the Holy Scriptures of both Testaments have the dual character which the

18 viva voce teaching of prophets, apostles and supremely Jesus had: in content, if not in grammatical form, it is both human witness to God and God’s witness to himself. The true analogy for inspiration is incarnation, the personal Word of God becoming flesh. As a multiple confession of faith in the God who rules, judges and saves in the space-time continuum which we call world history, the Bible consists of occasional documents, historical didactic and liturgical, all proclaiming in various ways what God has done, is doing and will do. Each document and each utterance within that document, like Jesus Christ and each of his utteran- ces, is anchored in a particular historical situation - this particu- larity marks all the Christian revelation - and to discern within these particularities truths from God for universal application is the interpreter’s major task. His guideline is the knowledge that God’s word for today is found through understanding and rea- pplying the word that God spoke long ago in identity (substantial, not grammatical) with the message of the biblical authors. The way into God’s mind remains via their minds, for their assertions about God embody in particularized form what he wants to tell us today about himself. In other words, God says in application to us the same things that he originally said in application to those to whom the biblical books were first addressed. The details of the second application differ from the first in a way that corresponds to the difference between our situation and that of the first addresses, but the truths of principle being applied are the same. Divine speech is itself, of course, a model, but it is a controlling one. It signifies the reality of mind-to-mind instruction from God to us by verbal means, and thus teaches us to categorize all other didactic models found in Scripture, not as hypothesis or hunch, but as revelation. How do these revealed models become means of God’s instruction? Here, it must regretfully be said, Ian Ramsey, the pioneer exponent of the model-structure of biblical thinking, fails us.

19 He describes vividly how these models trigger off religious disclosures and so evoke religious responses, but instead of equating the beliefs they express with divine teaching he leaves quite open, and therefore quite obscure, the relation between the ‘disclosures’ as intuitions of reality and the thoughts which the models convey. This means that he lacks criteria for distinguishing true from false intuitions. Sometimes he speaks as if all feelings of ‘cosmic disclosure’ convey insights that are true and self-authenticating, but one need only mention the Buddha, Mohammed, Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy, the fake prophets exposed by Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Micaiah in 1 Kings 22; and the visionaries of Colossians 2:18f., to show that this is not so. Also Ramsey seems to be without criteria for relating models to each other and developing from them a coherent belief-system, and he nowhere considers what the divine-speech model implies. 13 Must our understanding of how biblical models function be as limited or as loose as Ramsey’s is? Not necessarily. Recognition that the biblical witness to God has the logic of models - not isolated, incidentally, but linked together, and qualifying each other in sizeable units of meaning - is compatible with all the views taken in the modern hermeneutical debate. Central to this debate are two questions. The first is whether the reference-point and subject-matter of biblical witness is just the transformed psyche, the ‘new being’ as such, or whether it does not also, and indeed primarily, refer to saving acts of God and a living divine Saviour that were originally there as datable realities in the space-time continuum of world history, and that owe their transforming power ‘here’ in Christian lives now to the fact that they were ‘there’ on the stage of history then. To the extent that the former alternative is embraced, one has to say that the only factual information which the biblical writers communicate is that God’s people felt and thought in certain ways at certain times in Certain situations. Then one has to face the question whether the writers thought

20 this was all the factual information they were communicating; if one says no, then one has to justify one’s disagreement with them; if one says yes, one has to explain why so much of their witness to Christ has the form of factual narration about him - why, indeed, the ‘gospel’ as a literary form was ever invented. If, however, one takes the latter alternative, as all sober reason seems to counsel, then the second central question arises: how much distortion of fact is there in the narrating, and how much of guesswork, hunch, and fantasy is there in the interpreting of the historical realities that were ‘there’? I cannot discuss these massive and complex issues here; suffice it to declare, in relation to this debate, that I am proceeding on the basis that the biblical writers do indeed give true information about certain historical events, public and in principle datable, which have resulted in a Saviour and a salvation being ‘there’ for sinners to receive by faith; and that the biblical thought-models in terms of which these events are presented and explained are revealed models, ways of thought that God himself has taught us for the true understanding of what he has done for us and will do in us. Also, I proceed on the basis that the Holy Spirit who inspired prophetic and apostolic testimony in its written as well as its oral form is now active to teach Christians through it, making them aware of its divine quality overall, its message to themselves, and the presence and potency of God in Christ to whom it points. Since the Spirit has been teaching the church in this way in every age, much of our listening to the Bible in the present will rightly take the form of reviewing theological constructions of the past, testing them by the written word from which they took their rise. When a particular theological view, professedly Bible-based, has over the centuries proved a mainspring of Christian devotion, faith and love, one approaches it, not indeed uncritically, but with respect, anticipating the discovery that it is substantially right. Our present task is to elucidate and evaluate one historic line of

21 biblical interpretation which has had an incalculable impact on countless lives since it was clarified in the century of the Reforma- tion; it will be strange if it proves to have been entirely wrong. 14 So much, then, for methodological preliminaries, which have been tedious but necessary; now to our theme directly.

III. SUBSTITUTION The first thing to say about penal substitution has been said -al ready. It is a Christian theological model, based on biblical exegesis, formed to focus a particular awareness of what Jesus did at Calvary to bring us to God. If we wish to speak of the ‘doctrine’ of penal substitution, we should remember that this model is a dramatic, kerygmatic picturing of divine action, much more like Aulén’s ‘classic idea’ of divine victory (though Aulén never saw this) than it is like the defensive formula-models which we call the Nicene ‘doctrine’ of the Trinity and the Chalcedonian ‘doctrine’ of the person of Christ. Logically, the model is put together in two stages: first, the death of Christ is declared to have been substitutionary; then the substitution is characterized, and given a specific frame of reference by adding the word penal. We shall examine the two stages separately. Stage one is to declare Christ’s death substitutionary. What does this mean? The Oxford English Dictionary defines substitution as ‘the putting of one person or thing in the place of another’. One oddity of contemporary Christian talk is that many who affirm that Jesus’ death was vicarious and representative deny that it was substitutionary; for the Dictionary defines both words in substitutionary terms! Representation is said to mean ‘the fact of standing for, or in place of, some other thing or person, esp. with a right or authority to act on their account; substitution of one thing or person for another.’ And vicarious is defined as ‘that takes or supplies the place of another thing or person; substituted ins-

22 tead of the proper thing or person.’ So here, it seems, is a distinc- tion without a difference. Substitution is, in fact, a broad idea that applies whenever one person acts to supply another’s need, or to discharge his obligation, so that the other no longer has to carry the load himself. As Pannenberg says, ‘in social life, substitution is a universal phenomenon. . . . Even the structure of vocation, the division of labour, has substitutionary character. One who has a vocation performs this function for those whom he serves.’ For every service has vicarious character by recognizing a need in the person served that apart from the service that person would have to satisfy for himself.’ 15 In this broad sense, nobody who wishes to say with Paul that there is a true sense in which ‹Christ died for us› (huper, on our behalf, for our benefit), and ‘Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us’ (huper again) (Rom 5:8; Gal 3:13), and who accepts Christ’s assuran- ce that he came ‘to give his life a ransom for many’ (anti, which means precisely ‘in place of’, ‘in exchange for’ 16 ), should hesitate to say that Christ›s death was substitutionary. Indeed, if he describes Christ›s death as vicarious he is actually saying it. It is, of course, no secret why people shy off this word. It is because they equate, and know that others equate, substitution in Christology with penal substitution. This explains the state of affairs which, writing in 1948, F. W. Camfield described as follows:

If there is one conclusion which (has) come almost to be taken for granted in enlightened Christian quarters, it is that the idea of substitution has led theology on a wrong track; and that the word ‘substitution’ must now be dropped from the doctrine of the Atonement as too heavily laden with misleading and even false connotations. By ‘liberal’ or ‘modernist’ theology the idea of substitution is of course rejected out of hand. And even the theology which prides itself on being “positive” and “evangelical” and which seeks to maintain lines of communication with the great traditional doctrines of

23 atonement is on the whole disposed to reject it. And this, not merely on the ground that it holds implications which are irrational and morally offensive, but even and specifically on the ground that it is unscriptural. Thus Dr Vin- cent Taylor as a result of exhaustive examination of the “Idea of Atonement in the New Testament” gives it as his conclusion that the idea of substitution has no place in the New Testament writings; that in fact it is opposed to the fundamental teaching of the New Testament; that even St Paul though he sometimes trembles on the edge of substitutionary conceptions nevertheless avoids them. It is difficult to escape the impression that Dr. Vincent Taylor’s anxiety to eliminate the idea of substitution from evangelical theology has coloured his interpretation of the New Testament witness. But his conclu- sions provide a striking indication of the tendency at work in modern evangelical circles. It is felt that nothing has done more to bring the evangelical doctrine of the Atonement into disrepute than the idea of substitution; and therefore, something like a sigh of relief makes itself heard when it is sugges- ted that this idea rests on a misunderstanding of the teaching of Scripture.’ 17

Today, more than a quarter of a century later, the picture Cam- field draws would have to be qualified by reference to the vigorous vindication and use of the substitution idea by such as Pannen- berg and Barth; 18 nonetheless, in British theology the overall situation remains very much as Camfield describes. It would, however, clarify discussion if all who hold that Jesus by dying did something for us which we needed to do but could not, would agree that they are regarding Christ’s death as substitutionary, and differing only on the nature of the action which Jesus performed in our place and also, perhaps, on the way we enter into the benefit that flows from it. Camfield himself goes on to spell out a non-penal view of substitution. Broadly speaking, there have been three ways in which Christ’s death has been explained in the church. Each reflects a particular view of the nature of God and our plight in sin, and of what is

24 needed to bring us to God in the fellowship of acceptance on his side and faith and love on ours. It is worth glancing at them to see how the idea of substitution fits in with each. There is first, the type of account which sees the cross as having its effect entirely on men, whether by revealing God’s love to us, or by bringing home to us how much God hates our sins, or by setting us a supreme example of godliness, or by blazing a trail to God which we may now follow, or by so involving mankind in his redemptive obedience that the life of God now flows into us, or by all these modes together. It is assumed that our basic need is lack of motivation Godward and of openness to the inflow of divine life; all that is needed to set, us in a right relationship with God is a change in us at these two points, and this Christ’s death brings about. The forgiveness of our sins is not a separate problem; as soon as we are changed we become forgivable, and are then forgiven at once. This view has little or no room for any thought of substitution, since it goes so far in equating what Christ did for us with what he does to us. A second type of account sees Christ’s death as having its effect primarily on hostile spiritual forces external to us which are held to be imprisoning us in a captivity of which our inveterate moral twistedness is one sign and symptom. The cross is seen as the work of God going forth to battle as our champion, just as David went forth as Israel’s champion to fight Goliath. Through the cross these hostile forces, however conceived - whether as sin and death, Satan and his hosts, the demonic in society and its structures, the powers of God’s wrath and curse, or anything else - are overcome and nu- llified, so that Christians are not in bondage to them, but share Christ’s triumph over them. The assumption here is that man’s plight is created entirely by hostile cosmic forces distinct from God; yet, seeing Jesus as our champion, exponents of this view could still properly call him our substitute, just as all the Israelites who de- clined Goliath’s challenge in 1 Samuel 17:8-11 could properly call

25 David their substitute. Just as a substitute who involves others in the consequences of his action as if they had done it themselves is their representative, so a representative discharging the obligations of those whom he represents is their substitute. What this type of account of the cross affirms (though it is not usually put in these terms) is that the conquering Christ, whose victory secured our release, was our representative substitute. The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the other two views save their assumption that they are complete. It that there is biblical support for all they say, but it goes further. It grounds man’s plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that, for all God’s daily goodness to him, as a sinner he stands under divine judgment, and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence, and unless God’s rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost for ever. On this view, Christ’s death had its effect first on God, who was hereby propitiated (or, better, who hereby propitiated himself), and only because it had this effect did it become an overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of God’s seeking and saving love. The thought here is that by dying Christ offered to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins, satisfaction which God’s own character dictated as the only means whereby his ‘no’ to us could become a ‘yes’, Whether this God- ward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself, or death as the perfecting of holy obedience, or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell, which is God’s final judgment on sin, or a perfect confession of man’s sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification, or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together), the shape of this view remains the same - that by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins, propitiated our Maker, turned God’s ‘no’ to us into a ‘yes’, and so saved us. All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact, whether or not they call him that, but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal.

26 This analysis prompts three comments. First, it should be noted that though the two former views regularly set themselves in antithesis to the third, the third takes up into itself all the positive assertions that they make; which raises the question whether any more is at issue here than the impropriety of treating half-truth as the whole truth, and of rejecting a more comprehensive account on the basis of speculative negations about what God’s holiness requires as a basis for forgiving sins. Were it allowed that the first two views might be misunderstanding and distorting themselves in this way, the much-disputed claim that a broadly substitutionary view of the cross has always been the mainstream Christian opinion might be seen to have substance in it after all. It is a pity that books on the atonement so often take it for granted that accounts of the cross which have appeared as rivals in historical debate must be treated as intrinsically exclusive. This is always arbitrary, and sometimes quite perverse. Second, it should be noted that our analysis was simply of views about the death of Christ, so nothing was said about his resurrection. All three types of view usually agree in affirming that the resurrection is an integral part of the gospel; that the gospel proclaims a living, vindicated Saviour whose resurrection as the firstfruits of the new humanity is the basis as well as the pattern for ours is not a matter of dispute between them. It is sometimes pointed out that the second view represents the resurrection of Jesus as an organic element in his victory over the powers of death, whereas the third view does not, and hardly could, represent it as an organic element in the bearing of sin’s penalty or the tas- ting and confessing of its vileness (however the work of Calvary is conceived); and on this basis the third view is sometimes criti- cized as making the resurrection unnecessary. But this criticism may be met in two ways. The first reply is that Christ’s saving work has two parts, his dealing with his Father on our behalf by offering

27 himself in substitutionary satisfaction for our sins and his dealing with us on his Father’s behalf by bestowing on us through faith the forgiveness which his death secured, and it is as important to distinguish these two parts as it is to hold them together. For a demonstration that part two is now possible because part one is finished, and for the actual implementing of part two, Jesus’ resurrection is indeed essential, and so appears as an organic element in his work as a whole. The second reply is that these two ways of viewing the cross should in any case be synthesized, following the example of Paul in Colossians 2:13-15, as being complementary models expressing different elements in the single complex reality which is the mystery of the cross. Third, it should be noted that not all advocates of the third type of view have been happy to use the word ‘substitution’. This has been partly, through desire to evade the Socinian criticism that in the penal realm substitution is impossible, and partly for fear that to think of Christ dying for us as our substitute obscures his call to us to die and rise in him and with him, for the moral transforming of us into his holy image. P.T. Forsyth, for example, is one who stresses the vicariousness of Christ’s action in his passion as he endured for man’s salvation God’s personal anger against man’s sin; 19 yet he rejects ‹substitution› in favour of ‘representation’ and replaces ‘substitutionary expiation (which, as these words arc commonly understood, leaves us too little committed)’ by ‘solidary reparation’, ‘solidary confession and praise’, because he wants to stress that we enter into salvation only as we identify with Christ’s death to sin and are re-created as the new humanity in him. 20 But, admirable as is Forsyth›s wish to stress what is in Romans 6:1-11, avoiding the word substitution can only have the effect of obscuring what is in Romans 3:21- 28, where Paul describes Christ as ‘a propitiation 21 . . . by his blood› (verse 25) in virtue of which God bestows ‹the free gift of righteousness› (5:17) upon believing sinners and so ‹justifies

28 the ungodly› (4:5). As James Denney, said, ‹If Christ died the death in which sin had involved us - if in His death He took the responsibility of our sins on Himself - no word is equal to this which falls short of what is meant by calling Him our substitute.› 22 The correct reply to Forsyth would seem to be that before Christ›s death can be representative, in Forsyth›s sense of setting a pattern of ‹confession and praise› to be reproduced in our own self-denial and cross-bearing, it has to be substitutionary in Denney›s sense of absorbing God›s wrath against our sins; otherwise, our ‹confession and praise› in solidarity with Christ becomes itself a ploy for averting that wrath - in other words, a meritorious work, aimed at securing pardon, assuming that in Christ we save ourselves. What Denney said about this in 1903 was in fact an answer by anticipation to Forsyth’s formula of 1910. A reviewer of The Dea- th of Christ had argued that ‘if we place ourselves at Paul’s point of view, we shall see that to the eye of God the death of Christ presents itself less as an act which Christ does for the race than as an act which the race does in Christ.’ In The Atonement and the Modern Mind Denney quoted these words and commented on them thus: ‘In plain English, Paul teaches less that Christ died for the ungodly, than that the ungodly in Christ died for themselves. This brings out the logic of what representative means when representative is opposed to substitute, 23 The representative is ours, we are in Him, and we are supposed to get over all the moral difficulties raised by the idea of substitution just because He is ours, and because we are one with Him, But the fundamental fact of the situation is that, to begin with, Christ is not ours, and we are not one with Him. . . . we are «without Christ» (choris Christou). . . . A representative not produced by us, but given to us - not chosen by us, but the elect of God - is not a representative at all in the first instance, but a substitute,’ 24

29 So the true position, on the type of view we are exploring, may be put thus: We identify with Christ against the practice of sin because we have already identified him as the one who took our place under sentence for sin. We enter upon the life of repentance because we have learned that he first endured for us the death of reparation. The Christ into whom we now accept incorporation is the Christ who previously on the cross became our propitiation - not, therefore, one in whom we achieve our reconciliation with God, but one through whom we receive it as free gift based on a finished work (cf. Rom 5:10); and we love him, because he first loved us and gave himself for us, So substitution, on this view, really is the basic category; the thought of Christ as our representative, however construed in detail, cannot be made to mean what substitution means, and our solidarity with Christ in ‘confession and praise’, so far from being a concept alternative to that of substitution, is actually a response which presupposes it.

IV. PENAL SUBSTITUTION Now we move to the second stage in our model-building, and bring in the word ‘penal’ to characterize the substitution we have in view. To add this ‘qualifier’, as Ramsey would call it, is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively, but regulatively) within the world of moral law, guilty conscience, and retributive justice. Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted, but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ. The notion which the phrase ‘penal substitution’ expresses 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. To affirm penal subs-

30 titution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this, and that this is the mainspring of all their joy, peace and praise both now and for eternity. The general thought is clear enough, but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning, and here a methodological choice must be made, Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution, or construct a composite of our own? At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is, I su- ppose, the gentleman’s way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course, for the following main reasons. First, there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been, and still sometimes is, asserted in ways which merit the fa- vourite adjective of its critics - ‘crude’. As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical piety - ‘popular piety’, as Roman Catholics would call it - ways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evo- cative without always being theologically rigorous. Moreover, the more theological expositions of it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded; constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy, and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied, ‘uphol- ders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else. Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories, but sometimes they have in practice ignored them.’ 25 Also, as we have seen, much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century, at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncritici- zed and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law, and this has left its mark on many later statements. All this, being so, it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative, and it will certainly be more straight-forward if I venture an analysis of my own.

31 Second, I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics. One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries, from the Socinians to the Hegelians, was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a ‘theory’ in theology is to resolve ‘how’ problems within an established frame of thought about God and man. In other words, theological theories are like detectives’ theories in whodunits; they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of ‘mystery stories’ is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain). Now we have seen that, for discernible historical reasons, penal substitution has sometimes been explicated as a theory of this kind, telling us how divine love and justice could be, and were, ‘reconciled’ (whatever that means); but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right. Is the harmonization of God’s attributes any part of the information, or is it even the kind of information, that the inspired writers are concerned to give? Gustaf Aulén characterized the ‘Christus victor’ motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics, and contrasted it in this respect with the ‘Latin’ view, of which penal substitution is one form; 26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea, declaring the fact of the atonement kergyma- tically, i.e. as gospel (good news), just as Aulén’s conquest-motif is concerned to do? I believe it should. Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of God’s ways, but the remission of my sins; and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that, on the one hand, no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise, and, on the other hand, that the risen Christ whom I am

32 called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus, who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due. The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to ‘solve’ or dissipate the, mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery!); the effect is simply to define that work with precision, and thus to evoke faith, hope, praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ. So, at least, I think, and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a ker- gymatic model; and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition, which will aim to be both descriptive of what all who have held this view had had in common, and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion. Third, if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light, and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal. The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that, over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus’ criticism), they are less than fully personal. Thus, for instance, C.W.H. Lam- pe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that ‘God inflicts retributive punishment’, and ‘retribution is impersonal; it considers offences in the ‘abstract . . . we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God . . . the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution . . . to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love. . . . It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a conception of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place. It is time, too, to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it “sentimentality” to reject the idea of a God of retribution.’ 27 Lampe›s violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal, non-loving order of relationships, and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here.

33 James Denney’s sense of the contrast between personal relations, which are moral, and legal relations, which tend to be impersonal, external and arbitrary, once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampe’s. ‘Few things have astonished me more’ (he wrote) ‘than to be charged with teaching a “forensic” or “legal” or “judicial’ doctrine of Atone- ment. . . . There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words. To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statute - that sin is a breach of statute - that the sinner is a criminal - and that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case. Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth.’ 28 It is noticeable that Denney, the champion of the substitutionary idea, never calls Christ›s substitution ‹penal›; in his situation, the avoi- dance must have been deliberate. Yet Denney affirmed these four truths: first, that ‹the relations of God and man . . . are personal, but . . . determined by (moral) law› ; second, ‹that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal, that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin, and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death›; third, that ‹the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil... are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner. They are nothing if not retributive›; and, fourth, ‹that while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience, or making Him the personal object of divine wrath, they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race . . . and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin’. 29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all

34 Lampe›s strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it. But the formulation itself will have to be my own. So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement, under five heads: substitution and retribution; substitution and solidarity; substitution and mystery; substitution and salvation; substitution and divine love. Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not.

1. Substitution and retribution Penal substitution, as an idea, presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims. The locus classicus on this is Romans 1:18-3:20; but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament. The judicial context is a moral context too; whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality, the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding. Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence, and God himself is in charge of this process, en- suring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always ‘there’ to touch and wither what we are and shall be. In the words of Emil Brunner, ‘Guilt means that our past - that which can never be made good - always constitutes one element in our present situation.’ 30 When Lady Macbeth, walking and talking in her sleep, sees blood on her hand, and cannot clean or sweeten it, she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective men - certainly, those who believe in penal substitution - have come to know it: wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time, as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah, but sooner or later it comes back to mind, as David›s sin did under Nathan›s ministry, and at once our attention is absorbed, our peace and pleasure are gone, and something tells us that we ought to

35 suffer for what we have done. When joined with inklings of God›s displeasure, this sense of things is the start of hell. Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is intro- duced, to focus for us four insights about our situation. Insight one concerns God; it is that the retributive principle has his sanction, and indeed expresses the holiness, justice and goodness reflected in his law, and that death, spiritual as well as physical, the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body, is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us, and now prepares to inflict. Insight two concerns ourselves: it is that, standing thus under sentence, we are helpless either to undo, the past or to shake off sin in the present, and thus have no way of averting what threa- tens. Insight three concerns Jesus Christ: it is that he, the God-man of John 1:1-18 and Hebrews 1-2; took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of’ the death that was our sentence, whatever these were, so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity.

‘We may not know, we cannot tell What pains he had to bear; But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered there.’

Insight four concerns faith: it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope. Faith sees that God’s demands remain what they were, and that God’s law of retribution, which our conscience declares to be right, has not ceased to operate in his world, nor ever will; but that in our case the law has operated already, so that all our sins, past present and even future, have been covered by Calvary. So our

36 conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished, however strange the statement may sound, in the person and death of another. Bunyan’s pilgrim before the cross loses his burden, and Toplady can assure himself that:

‘If thou my pardon hast secured, And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine, Payment God cannot twice demand, First from my bleeding surety’s hand And then again from mine.’

Reasoning thus, faith grasps the reality of God’s free gift of righteousness, i.e. the ‘rightness’ with God that the righteous enjoy (cf. Rom 5:16f.), and with it the justified man’s obligation to live henceforth ‘unto’ the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf. 2 Cor 5:14). This analysis, if correct, shows what job the word ‘penal’ does in our model. It is there, not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt, but to articulate the insight of believers who, as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament, are constrained to say, ‘Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve), the penalty for my sins, the punishment due to me’ - ‘he loved me, and gave himself for me’ (Gal 2:20). How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know, any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man; but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest.

2. Substitution and solidarity Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not trans- ferable and the substitution described, if real, would be immoral, our model now invokes Paul’s description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam, who involved us in his

37 sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf. 1 Cor 15:45ff.; Rom 5:12 ff.). Penal substitution was seen by Luther, the pioneer in stating it, and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity, and as being one ‹moment› in the larger mystery of what Luther called ‹a wonderful exchange› 31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates ‘interchange in Christ’, 32 In this mystery there are four ‹moments› to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation, ‹born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem them which were under the law› (Gal 4:4f.). The second ‘moment’ was the cross, where Jesus, as Luther and Calvin put it, carried our identity 33 and effectively involved us all in his dying - as Paul says, ‹one died for all, therefore all died› (2 Cor 5:14). Nor is this sharing in Christ’s death a legal fiction, a form of words to which no reality corresponds; it is part of the objective fact of Christ, the mystery that is ‘there’ whether we grasp it or not. So now Christ’s substitution for us, which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in per- forming it, is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us, inasmuch as ontologically and objectively, in a manner trans- cending bounds of space and time, Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection. Thus knowledge of Christ’s death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves ac dead, risen and alive for evermore in him, We who believe have died - painlessly and invisibly, we might say - in solidarity with him because he died, painfully and publicly, in substitution for us. His death for us brought remission of sins committed ‘in’ Adam so that ‘in’ him we might enjoy God’s acceptance; our death ‘in’ him brings release from the existence we knew ‘in’ Adam, so that ‘in’ him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf. Rom 5—6; 2 Cor 5:17, 21; Col 2:6-3:4). The third ‘moment’ in this interchange comes when, through faith and God’s gift of the Spirit, we become ‘the righteousness of

38 God’ and ‘rich’ - that is, justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christ - by virtue of him who became ‘poor’ for us in the incarnation and was ‘made sin’ for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf. 2 Cor 5:21; 8:9). And the fourth ‘moment’ will be when this same Jesus Christ, who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us, reappears to ‘fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory’ (cf. Phil 2:5-11; 3:21). Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange, viewed as a whole, Christ the ‘pioneer’ (archagos: Heb 2:10; 12:2) is best designated the ‘representative’ and ‘first-fruits’ of the new humanity, rather than be called our substitute. 34 Inasmuch as the interchange-theme cen- tres upon our renewal in Christ’s image, this point may be readily accepted, provided it Is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing, which is at the heart of the interchange, Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute, since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such suffering - no God for sakenness, no dereliction - should remain for us. In the light of earlier discussion 35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christ›s death representative rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused, since it suggests, first, that we chose Christ to act for us, second, that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us, and third, that by dying in Christ we atone for our sins - all of which are false. Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposal - namely, that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsakenness of penal judgment, which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place. The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus’ representative relation to us, as the last Adam whose image we are to bear, took the form of substituting for us under judgment, as the suffering servant of God on whom the

39 Lord ‘laid the iniquity of us all’. 36 The two ideas, representation and substitution, are complementary, not alternatives, and both are needed here.

3 Substitution and mystery It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay ‘behind’ Christ’s atoning, death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies ‘behind’ the boiling of a kettle, but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of’ the mystery - that is, according to our earlier definition, the transcendent and not-wholly-comprehen- sible divine reality - of Christ’s atoning death itself, as the New Testament writers declare it, Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source, and of which it is the measure (cf. Rom 5:8; 1 John 4:8-10; ohn 15:13); the mysterious necessity for it, evident from Paul’s witness in Ro- mans 8:32 that God did not spare his Son, but gave him up to death for us, which shows that, he being he, he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself; the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be ‹made sin› by the imputing to him of our answerability, and could die for our sins in our place, and we could be ‹made righteous› before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf. Rom 5:17-19; 2 Cor 5:21; and the mysterious mode of union whereby, without any diminution of our indivi- duality as persons, or his, Christ and we are ‘in’ each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life. Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrass- ment, nor need it; since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to God’s work, it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere. (Indeed, there are more than we listed; for a full statement, the tri-unity of the loving God, the incarnation itself, and

40 God’s predestining the free acts of his enemies, would also, have to come in.) To the question, what does the cross mean in God’s plan for man’s good, a biblical answer is ready to hand, but when we ask how these things can be we find ourselves facing mystery at every point. Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the so1idarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness. This, however, is ‘naturalistic’ criticism, which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either. Such criticism is profoundly perverse, for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware. (When man justifies the wicked, it is a miscarria- ge of justice which God hates, but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov 17:15; Rom 4:5].) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God; to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us, even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word ‘supernatural’ in theology); and to remember that what is above reason is not necessarily against it. As regards the atonement, the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it; speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding, nothing more.

4. Substitution and salvation So far our analysis has, I think, expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross. But now comes a point of uncertainty and division. That Christ’s penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole

41 meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored, and is in this sense decisive for our salvation, is a Reforma- tion point against Rome 37 to which all conservative Protestants hold. But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days› notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute). Should we not then think of Christ›s substitution for us on the cross as a definite, one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner? This seems scriptural, for Paul says, ‹He loved me and gave himself for me› (Gal 2:20). But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obligation as a sinner, does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground, but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith, and through faith to eternal life? For is not the faith which receives salvation part of God’s gift of salvation, according to what is affirmed in Philippians 1:29 and John 6:44f. and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth? 38 And if Christ by his death on my behalf secured, reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom 5:11, 17), did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me, as a direct consequence of Christ’s dying for me? Once this is granted, however, we are shut up to a choice between universa1ism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race. But if we reject these options, what have we left? The only coherent alternative is to -su ppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross, some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief; which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God, after all, does no more than make faith possible, and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual.

42 Moreover, any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms, if indeed they do not drop the term altogether, for they are committing themselves to deny that Christ’s vicarious sacrifice ensures anyone’s salvation. Also, they have to give up To- plady’s position. ‘Payment God cannot twice demand, First from my bleeding surety’s hand, And then again from mine’ - for it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore, with saving intent, will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons. So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else, to evade this inference, deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone; and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else, to evade this inference, restrict the scope of the substitution, making it a substitution for some, not all. 39 All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time; 40 only the presentation is novel, since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christ›s substitution, taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring. In modern usage that indeed is what it is, but only during the past century has it become so; prior to that, all conservative Protestants, at least in the English-speaking world, preferred ‹satisfaction› as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross. 41 As I pointed it up, the matter in debate might seem purely verbal, but there is more to it than that. The question is, whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional ‘weave’ of Scripture, to which ‘penal substitution’ as a theological model must conform. There seems little doubt as to the answer. Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form, nor is their

43 language about .the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun, they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved. The use made of the categories of ransom, redemption, reconciliation, sacrifice and victory; the many declarations of God’s purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him, the church, his sheep and friends, God’s people; the many statements viewing Christ’s heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death; and the uniform view of faith as a means, not of meriting, but of receiving - all these features point unambiguously in one direction. Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christ’s having died ‘for’ (huper) us - that is, us who now believe - guarantees final blessed- ness. In 5:8f. he says: ‘While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood, shall we be saved from the wrath through him.’ In 8:32 he asks: ‘He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things?’ Moreover, Paul and John explicitly depict God’s saving work as a unity in which Christ’s death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called ‘application of redemption’ - God ‘calling’ and ‘drawing’ unbelievers to himself, justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe, and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence. 42 To be sure, Paul and John insist, as all the New Testament does, that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf. John 3:16; Rom 10:13); this, indeed, is to them the primary truth, and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in John’s case, on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for, and give hope of, the phenomenon of sinners responding to God’s promise. Thus, through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands, Christians are assured of

44 being kept safe, and evangelists of not labouring in vain. It may be added: is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the ‘free offer’ of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing, the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond, when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed? At all events, if the use historically made of the penal substitution model is examined, there is no doubt, despite occasional contusions of thought, that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation.

5. Substitution and divine love The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love man, which he did not do before. The criticism is, however, inept, for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model, for which the moti- vational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic. The New Testament presents God’s gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only-be- gotten Son’ (John 3:16). ‘God is love, . . . Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins’ (1 John 4:8-10). ‘God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us’ (Rom 5:8), Similarly, the New Testament presents the Son’s voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men. ‘He loved me, and gave himself for me’ (Gal 2:20). ‘Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends . . .’ (John 15:13f.) And the two loves, the love of Father and Son, are one: a point which the penal substitution model, as used, firmly grasps. Furthermore, if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help, and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear,

45 then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement, for it sees the Son at his Father’s will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest. That death on the cross was a criminal’s death, physically as painful as, if not more painful than, any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen; and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man, and yet of being despised and rejected, whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness, by persons he had loved and tried to save - this is ground common to all views, and tells us already that the love of Jesus, which took him to the cross, brought him appallingly low. But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress, compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into in- significance. This is the dimension indicated by Denney - ‘that in that dark hour He had to realize to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race.’ Owen stated this formally, abstractly and non-psychologically: Christ, he said, satisfied God’s justice ‘for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction, by undergoing that same punishment which, by reason of the obligation that was upon them, they were bound to undergo. When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure, though not in all accidents of duration and the like . . .’ 43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought with tender and noble empathy: ‹God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him, and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath. This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him, because they were from the hand of his Father, whom he infinitely loved, and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of. Besides, it was an effect of God›s wrath that he forsook Christ. This caused Christ to cry out . . . «My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?» This was infinitely terrible to Christ. Christ›s knowledge of the glory of the Father, and his love to the Father, and the sense

46 and experience he had had of the worth of his Father›s love to him, made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Father’s love as terrible to him, as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned, that have no knowledge of God’s exce- llency, no love to him, nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love.’ 44 And the legendary ‹Rabbi› Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence, in a famous outburst to one of his classes: ‹D’ye know what Calvary was? what? what? what?’ Then, with tears on his face - ‘It was damnation; and he took it lovingly.’ It is precisely this love that, in the last analysis, penal substitution is all about, and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it. 45 What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus, but from McLeod Campbell, who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all), Reformed exponents of this view reduced God’s love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character, but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us, ‘the unknown God’. 46 The real target of Campbell›s criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which, rightly or wrongly, he thought Reformed theologians worked; and a sufficient reply, from the standpoint of this lecture, would be that since the Bible says both that Christ’s death was a penal substitution for God’s people and also that it reveals God’s love to sinful men as such, and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Father’s image, so that everything we learn of the Son’s love is knowledge of the Father’s love also, Campbell’s complaint is unreal. But Campbell’s criticism, if carried, would be fatal, for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self-condemned. The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now, I believe, all before us, along with the task it performs. It

47 embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion, and which I therefore state in personal terms, as follows:

• (1) God, in Denney’s phrase, ‘condones nothing’, but judges all sin as it deserves: which Scripture affirms, and my conscience confirms, to be right. • (2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from God’s presence (conscience also confirms this), and nothing I do can blot them out. • (3) The penalty due to me for my sins, whatever it was, was paid for me by Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in his death on the cross. • (4) Because this is so, I through faith in him am made ‘the righteousness of God in him’, i.e. I am justified; pardon, acceptance and sonship become mine. • (5) Christ’s death for me is my sole ground of hope before God. ‘If he fulfilled not justice, I must; if he underwent not wrath, I must to eternity.’ 47 • (6) My faith in Christ is God’s own gift to me, given in virtue of Christ’s death for me: i.e. the cross procured it. • (7) Christ’s death for me guarantees my preservation to glory. • (8) Christ’s death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me. • (9) Christ’s death for me calls and constrains me to trust, to worship, to love and to serve.

Thus we see what, according to this model, the cross achieved and achieves.

V. CONCLUSION: THE CROSS IN THE BIBLE In drawing the threads together, two general questions about the

48 relation of the penal substitutionary model to the biblical data as a whole may be briefly considered. (1) Are the contents and functioning of this model inconsistent in any way with the faith and religion of the New Testament? Is it degrading to God, or morally offensive, as is sometimes alleged? Our analysis has, I hope, served to show that it is not any of these things. And to have shown that may not be time wasted, for it seems clear that treatments of biblical material on the atonement are often influenced by prejudices of this kind, which produce re- luctance to recognize how strong is the evidence for the integral place of substitution in biblical thinking about the cross. 48 (2) Is our model truly based on the Bible? On this, several quick points may be made. First, full weight must be given to the fact that, as Luther saw, the central question to which the whole New Testament in one way or another is addressed is the question of our relationship, here and hereafter, with our holy Creator: the question, that is, how weak, perverse, estranged and guilty sinners may gain and guard knowledge of God’s gracious pardon, acceptance and renewal. It is to this question that Christ is the answer, and that all New Testament interpretation of the cross relates. Second, full weight must also be given to the fact that all who down the centuries have espoused this model of penal substitution have done so because they thought the Bible taught it, and scholars who for whatever reason take a different view repeatedly acknowledge that there are Bible passages which would most naturally be taken in a penal substitutionary sense. Such passages include Isaiah 53 (where Whale, as we saw, [n. 36] finds penal substitution mentioned twelve times), Galatians 3:13, 2 Corin- thians 5:15, I Peter 3:18; and there are many analogous to these. Third, it must be noticed that the familiar exegetical arguments which, if accepted, erode the substitutionary view - the arguments, for instance, for a non-personal concept of God’s wrath

49 and a non-propitiatory understanding of the hilaskomai word. group, or for the interpreting of bloodshed in the Old Testament sacrifices as the release of life to invigorate rather than the ending of it to expiate - only amount to this: that certain passages may not mean quite what they have appeared to mean to Bible students of earlier generations. But at every point it remains distinctly argua- ble that the time-honored view is the true one, after all. Fourth, it must be noted that there is no shortage of scholars who maintain the integral place of penal substitution in the New Testament witness to the cross. The outstanding contributions of James Denney and Leon Morris have already been mentioned, and they do not stand alone. For further illustration of this point, I subjoin two quotations from Professor A. M. Hunter. I do so without comment; they speak for themselves. The first quotation is on the teaching of Jesus in the synop- tic gospels. Having referred to theories of the atonement ‘which deal in “satisfaction” or substitution, or make use of “the sacrificial principle”’, Hunter proceeds: ‘It is with this type of theory that the sayings of Jesus seem best to agree. There can be little doubt that Jesus viewed his death as a representative sacrifice for “the many”. Not only is His thought saturated in Isa. liii (which is a doctrine of representative suffering), but His words over the cup - indeed, the whole narrative of the Last Supper - almost demand to be interpreted in terms of a sacrifice in whose virtue His followers can share. The idea of substitution which is prominent in Isa. liii appears in the ransom saying. And it requires only a little reading between the lines to find in the “cup” saying, the story of the Agony, and the cry of dereliction, evidence that Christ’s sufferings were what, for lack of a better word, we can only call “penal”. 49 The second quotation picks up comments on what, by common consent, are Paul’s two loci classici on the method of atonement, 2 Corinthians 5:21 and Galatians 3:13. On the

50 first, Hunter writes: ‘Paul declares that the crucified Christ, on our behalf, took the whole reality of sin upon himself, like the scapegoat: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Paul sees the Cross as an act of God’s doing in which the Sinless One, for the sake of sinners, somehow experienced the horror of the divine reaction against sin so that there might be condemnation no more. ‘Gal 3:13 moves in the same realm of ideas. «Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us.»› (I interpose here my own comment, that Paul›s aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption, answering the question ‹how did Christ redeem us?›, and might equally well therefore be translated ‹by becoming a curse for us›.) ‹The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death. To this curse we lay exposed; but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that, through his act, the curse passes away and we go free. ‘Such passages show the holy love of God taking awful issue in the Cross with the sin of man. Christ, by God’s appointing, dies the sinner’s death, and so removes sin. Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins? We are not fond nowadays of calling Christ’s suffering “penal” or of styling him our “substitute”; but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Paul’s view of the atonement?’ 50 Well, can we? And if not, what follows? Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter? Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not, after all, the heart of the matter? These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised. It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve.

51 NOTES 1. Socinus’ arguments were incorporated in the Racovian Catechism, published at Racow (the modern Cracow) in 1605, which set forth the Unitarianism of the ‘Polish Brethren’. After several revisions of detail down to 1680 the text was finalized and in due course translated into English by Thomas Rees (London, 1818). It is a document of classical importance in Unitarian history. 2. See L. Berkhof, Systematic Theology 4, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, and Banner of Truths, London (1949) 373-383. Berkhof’s zeal to show that God did nothing illegal or unjust makes a strange impression on the post-Watergate reader. 3. See F. Turretin, Institutio Theologiae Elenchticae Geneva (1682), II. xiv, ‘De Officio Christi Mediatoris’, and A. A. Hodge, The Atonement, Nelson, London (1868). Turretin’s position is usefully summarized in L. W. Grensted, A Short History of the Doctrine of the Atonement, Manchester University Press (1 920) 241-252. Cf. J. F. Heidegger’s parallel account in his Corpus Theologiae Christianae, Zurich (1700), which R. S. Franks reviews in The Work of Christ, Nelson, London (1962) 426ff. 4. In his influential book Christus Victor, tr. A. G. Hebert, SPCK, London (1931), which advocated a ‘dramatic’, non-rational way of declaring God’s conquest of evil through the cross, Gustaf Aulén describes the ‘Latin’ account of the atonement (i.e. that of Anselm and Protestant orthodoxy) as ‘juridical in its inmost essence’ (p. 106), and says: ‘It concentrates its effort upon a rational attempt to explain how the Divine Love and the Divine Justice can be reconciled. The Love of God is regulated by His Justice, and is only free to act within the limits that Justice marks out. Ratio and Lex, rationality and justice, go hand in hand. . . The attempt is made by the scholastics to elaborate a theology which shall provide a comprehensive explanation of the Divine government of the world, which shall answer all questions and solve all riddles. . . .’ (pp. 173f.) What Aulén fails to note is how much of this implicitly rationalistic cast of thought was a direct reaction to Socinus’ rationalistic critique. In fact, Aulén does not mention Socinus at all; nor does he refer to Calvin, who asserts penal substitution as strongly as any, but follows an exegetical and Christocentric method which is not in the least scholastic or rationalistic. Calvin shows no interest in the reconciling of God’s love and justice as a theoretical problem; his only interest is in the mysterious but blessed fact that at the cross God did act in both love and justice to save us from our sins. Cf. P. van Buren, Christ in our Place: the substitutionary character of Calvin’s doctrine of Reconciliation, Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh (1957). 5. Ayer voiced his doubts in Language, Truth and Logic, Gollancz, London (1936, 2nd ed. 1946), Flew his in ‘Theology and Falsification’, New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. A. G. N. Flew and Alasdair Maclntyre, SCM, London (1955) 96-130. There are replies in, among other books, E. L. Mascall, Words and Images, Longmans, London (1957); Faith and Logic, ed. Basil Mitchell, Allen and Unwin, London (1957); Frederick Ferré, Language, Logic and God, Eyre and Spottiswoode, London (1962; Fontana ed. 1970); W. Hordern, Speaking of God, Macmillan, New York (1964). 6. Of the church in the patristic period H. B. W. Turner writes: ‘Its experience of Redemption through Christ was far richer than its attempted formulations of this experience’ (The Patristic Doctrine of Redemption, Mowbray, London (1952) 13; cf. chapter V, ‘Christ our Victim’). On T. F. Torrance’s sharp-edged thesis in The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers, Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh (1948) that the Apostolic Fathers lapsed from New Testament faith in the cross to a legalism of self-salvation, Robert S. Paul’s comment in The Atonement and the Sacraments, Hodder and Stoughton, London (1961), 37, note 2, is just: ‘To me he has made his case almost too well, for at the end I am left asking the question, “In what sense, then, could the Church change this much and still be the Church?” In fact, Torrance’s thesis needs the qualification of Turner’s statement quoted above. 7. Inst. II. xvii. 2. This thought is picked up in Anglican Article II: ‘Christ . . . truly suffered . . . to reconcile his Father to us, and to be a sacrifice, not only for original guilt, but also for all actual sins of men.’ On propitiation, cf. note 21 below. 8. For surveys of the present state of play, Ferré’s Language, Logic God; Ian C. Barbour, Myths, Models and Paradigms, SCM, London (1974); John Macquarrie, God-Talk, SCM, London (1967). 9. The pioneer in stating this was Ian T. Ramsey: see his Religious Language, SCM, London (1957); Models and Mystery, Oxford University Press London (1964); Christian Discourse, Oxford University Press, London (1965). For further discussion of models in theology cf. John Maclntyre, The Shape of Christology, SCM, London (1966), especially 54-81; Thomas Fawcett, The Symbolic Language of Religion, SCM, London (1970) 69-94; Barbour, op. cit. 10. The Shape of Christology, 63. 11. The idea of analogy is formulated by the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, s.v., as follows: ‘A method of predication whereby concepts derived from a familiar object are made applicable to a relatively unknown object

52 in virtue of some similarity between the two otherwise dissimilar objects.’ Aquinas’ account of analogy is in Summa Theologica I. xiii and can be read in Words about God, ed. Ian T. Ramsey, SCM, London (1971) 36ff. 12. For Thomists, the doctrine of analogy serves to explain how knowledge of creatures gives knowledge of their Creator (natural theology) as well as how biblical imagery gives knowledge of the God of both nature and grace (scriptural theology). For a technical Thomist discussion, concentrating on analogy in natural theology, see E. L. Mascall, Existence and Analogy, Longmans, London (1949) 92-121. 13. For Ramsey’s overall view of models, see the works cited in note 9. On most theological subjects his opinions, so far as he reveals them, are unexceptionably middle-of-the-road, but it is noteworthy that in his lecture on ‘Atonement Theology’ in Christian Discourse (pp. 28ff.) he hails Hastings Rashdall’s Abelardian treatise The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (1919) as ‘definitive’ (p. 29; no reasons given); limits the ‘cosmic disclosure’ evoked by the cross to a sense of ‘the victorious will of God’, whose plan to maintain a remnant did not fail (pp. 32, 34), and whose love this victory shows (pp. 59f.); rejects the grounding of justification on substitution or satisfaction as involving ‘frontier-clashes with the language of morals’ (p. 40; the old Socinian objection); and criticizes the exegeting of justification, substitution, satisfaction, reconciliation, redemption, propitiation and expiation as if these words ‘were not models at all, but described procedural transactions each describing a species of atonement engineering’ (p. 44). Profound confusion appears here. Certainly these words arc models, but what they are models of is precisely procedural transactions for achieving atonement, transactions in which the Father and the Son dealt with each other on our behalf. The contents apostolic argument in which these models appear make this unambiguously plain, and to assume, as Ramsey seems to do, that as models they can only have a directly subjective reference to what Bultmann would call a new self-understanding is quite arbitrary. Indeed, Ramsey himself goes on to show that the model-category for biblical concepts does not require an exclusively subjective reference, for he dwells on ‘love’ as a model of God’s activity (p. 59) and If love can be such a model, why not these other words? It seems evident that Ramsey brought Abelardian-Socinian assumptions to his study of the biblical words, rather than deriving his views from that study. 14. Cf. Vincent Taylor’s remark, in The Atonement in New Testament Teaching, Epworth Press, London (1940) 301f.: ‘The thought of substitution is one we have perhaps been more anxious to reject than to assess; yet the immeasurable sense of gratitude with which it is associated . . . is too great a thing to be wanting in a worthy theory of the Atonement.’ 15. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus-God and Man, tr. Lewis L. Wilkins and Duane A. Priebe, SCM, London (1968) 268, 259. 16. See R. E. Davies, ‘Christ in our Place-the contribution of the Prepositions’, Tyndale Bulletin 21 (1970) 72ff. 17. F. W. Camfield, ‘The Idea of Substitution in the Doctrine of the Atonement’, SJT I (1948) 282f., referring to Vincent Taylor, The Atonement in New Testament Teaching. Taylor, while allowing that Paul ‘in particular, is within a hair’s breadth of substitutions’ (p. 288), and that ‘a theologian who retires to a doctrinal fortress guarded by such ordnance as Mark x. 45, Romans vi. 10f., 2 Corinthians v. 14, 21, Galatians iii. 13, and 1 Timothy ii. 5f., is more difficult to dislodge than many New Testament students imagine’ (p. 289), rejects substitution as implying a redemption ‘wrought entirely outside of, and apart from, ourselves so that we have nothing to do but to accept its benefits’ (p. 125). He describes Christ’s death as a representative sacrifice, involving endurance of sin’s penalty plus that archetypal expression of penitence for humanity’s wrongdoing which was first conceived by McLeod Campbell and R. C. Moberly. We participate in this sacrifice, Taylor continues, by offering it on our own behalf, which we do by letting it teach us to repent. Taylor admits that from his standpoint there is ‘a gap in Pauline teaching. With clear eyes St Paul marks “the one act of righteousness” in the obedience of Christ (Romans v. 18f.) and the fact that He was “made to be sin on our behalf” (2 Corinthians v. 21), but he nowhere speaks of Him as voicing the sorrow and contrition of men in the presence of His Father’ (p. 291). 18. See Pannenberg, op. cit., pp. 258-269; Barth, Church Dogmatics IV. I, tr. G. W. Bromiley, T. and T. Clark, Edinburgh (1956), viif., 230ff., 550ff. 19. ‘He turned the penalty He endured into sacrifice He offered. And the sacrifice He offered was the judgment He accepted. His passive suffering became active obedience, and obedience to a holy doom’ (The Work of Christ, Hodder and Stoughton, London (1910) 163). In a 2,000-word ‘Addendum’ Forsyth combats the Ritschlian view, later to be espoused by C. H. Dodd, that the wrath of God is simply the ‘automatic recoil of His moral order upon the transgressor . , . as if there were no personal reaction of a Holy God Himself upon the sin, and no infliction of His displeasure upon the sinner’ (p. 239). He argues to the position that ‘what Christ bore was not simply a sense of the connection between the sinner and the impersonal consequences of sin, but a sense of the sinner’s relation to the personal vis-à-vis of an angry God. God never left him, but He did refuse Him His face. The communion was not broken, but its light was withdrawn’ (p. 243).

53 20. Op. cit., pp. 164, 182, 223, 225f. ‘Substitution does not take account of the moral results (of the cross) on the soul’ (p. 182, note). 21. ‘Propitiation’ (which means quenching God’s wrath against sinners) is replaced by ‘expiation’ (which means removing sins from God’s sight) in RSV and other modern versions. The idea of propitiation includes that of expiation as its means; thus the effect of this change is not to bring in a sacrificial motif that was previously absent, but to cut out a reference to quenching God’s anger that was previously thought to be present. The case for ‘expiation’ was put forward by C. H. Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support, but a generation of debate has shown that ‘the linguistic evidence seems to favour “propitiation”’ (Matthew Black, Romans, New Century Bible, Oliphants, London (1973) 68). See the full coverage of literature cited by Black, and also David Hill, Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings Cambridge University Press (1967) 23-48. 22. Denney, The Death of Christ, 2nd ed., including The Atonement and the Modern Mind, Hodder and Stoughtons, London (1911) 73. Denney’s summary of the meaning of Rom 3:25f. is worth quoting. ‘It is Christ set forth in His blood who is a propitiation; that is, it is Christ who died. In dying, as St Paul conceived it, He made our sin His own; He took it on Himself as the reality which it is in God’s sight and to God’s law: He became sin, became a curse for us. It is this which gives His death a propitiatory character and power; in other words, which makes it possible for God to be at once righteous and a God who accepts as righteous those who believe in Jesus. . . . I do not know any word which conveys the truth of this if “vicarious” or “substitutionary” does not, nor do I know any interpretation of Christ’s death which enables us to regard it as a demonstration of love to sinners, if this vicarious or substitutionary character is denied’ (p. 126). Denney’s point in the last sentence is that Christ’s death only reveals God’s love if it accomplished something which we needed, which we could not do for ourselves, and which Christ could not do without dying. 23. It should be noted that in addition to the rather specialized usage that Denney has in view, whereby one’s ‘representative’ is the one whose behaviour is taken as the model for one’s own, ‘representative’ may (and usually does) signify simply this: that one’s status is such that one involves others, for good or ill, in the consequences of what one does. In this sense, families are represented by fathers, nations by kings, presidents and government ministers, and humanity by Adam and Christ; and it was as our representative in this sense that Jesus became our substitute. Cf. pp. 33f below. 24. The Death of Christ, 304; cf. 307, ‘Union with Christ’ (i.e. personal, moral union, by faith) ‘. . . is not a presupposition of Christ’s work, it is its fruit.’ 25. Leon Morris, The Cross in the New Testament, Paternoster Press, Exeter (1965) 401. 26. Christus Victor, 175. etc. 27. G. W. H. Lampe, ‘The Atonement: Law and Love’, in Soundings, ed. A. R. Vidler, Cambridge University Press (1962) 187ff. 28. Denney, op. cit., 271f.; from The Atonement and the Modern Mind. Denney’s last sentence over-states; as J. S. Whale says, ‘the Christian religion has thought of Christ not only as Victor and as Victim, but also as “Criminal”’ and all three models (Whale calls them metaphors) have biblical justification (Victor and Victim, Cambridge University Press (1960) 70). 29. Denney, The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, Hodder and Stoughton, London (1917) 187, 214, 208, 273. On pp. 262f. and elsewhere Denney rejects as unintelligible all notions of a quantitative equivalence between Christ’s actual sufferings and those which sinners would have to endure under ultimate judgment; to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race’, whatever it meant, did not mean that. 30. Brunner, The Mediator, tr. O. Wyon, Lutterworth Press, London (1934) 443. 31. Two quotations give Luther’s viewpoint here. The first is from his exposition of Psalm 21 (22): ‹This is that mystery which is rich in divine grace to sinners: wherein by a wonderful exchange our sins are no longer ours but Christ›s: and the righteousness of Christ not Christ›s but ours. He has emptied himself of his righteousness that he might clothe us with it, and fill us with it: and he has taken our evils upon himself that he might deliver us from them . . . in the same manner as he grieved and suffered in our sins, and was confounded, in the same manner we rejoice and glory in his righteousness› (Werke (Weimar, 1883) 5.608). The second is from a pastoral letter to George Spenlein: ‘Learn Christ and him crucified. Learn to pray to him and, despairing of yourself, say: “Thou, Lord Jesus, art my righteousness, but I am thy sin. Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine. Thou hast taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not”’ (Letters of Spiritual Counsel, ed. Theodore C. Tappert (Library of Christian Classics) SCM Press, London (1955) 110. 32. Article in JTS 22 (1971) 349-361. 33. Luther puts this dramatically and exuberantly, as was always his way. ‘All the prophets did foresee in spirit, that Christ should become the greatest transgressor, murderer, adulterer, thief, rebel, blasphemer, etc., that ever was .

54 . . for he being made a sacrifice, for the sins of the whole world, is not now an innocent person and without sins . . . our most merciful Father . . . sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him the sins of all men, saying: Be thou Peter that denier; Paul that persecutor, blasphemer and cruel oppressor; David that adulterer; that sinner which did eat the apple in Paradise; that thief which hanged upon the cross; and, briefly, be thou the person which hath committed the sins of all men; see therefore that thou pay and satisfy for them. Here now cometh the law and saith: I find him a sinner . . . therefore let him die upon the cross . . .’ (Galatians, ed. Philip S. Watson, James Clarke, London (1953) 269-271; on Gal 3:13). Aulén (Christus Victor, chapter VI) rightly stresses the dynamism of divine victory in Luther’s account of the cross and resurrection, but wrongly ignores the penal substitution in terms of which Christ’s victorious work is basically defined. The essence of Christ’s victory, according to Luther, is that on the cross as our substitute he effectively purged our sins so freeing us from Satin’s power by overcoming God’s curse; if Luther’s whole treatment of Gal 3:13 (pp. 268-282) is read, this becomes very plain. The necessary supplement, and indeed correction, of the impression Aulén leaves is provided by Pannenberg’s statement (op. cit., 279): ‘Luther was probably the first since Paul and his school to have seen with full clarity that Jesus’ death in its genuine sense is to be understood as vicarious penal suffering.’ Calvin makes the same point in his more precise way, commenting on Jesus’ trial before Pilate. ‘When he was arraigned before a judgment-seat, accused and put under pressure by testimony, and sentenced to death by the words of a judge, we know by these records that he played the part (personam sustinuit) of a guilty wrongdoer . . . we see the role of sinner and criminal represented in Christ, yet from his shining innocence it becomes obvious that he was burdened with the misdoing of others rather than his own. . . . This is our acquittal, that the guilt which exposed us to punishment was transferred to the head of God’s Son. . . .’ ‘At every point he substituted himself in our place (in vicem nostram ubique se supposuerit) to pay the price of our redemption’ (Inst. II. XVI. 5, 7). It is inexplicable that Pannenberg (loc. cit.) should say that Calvin retreated from Luther’s insight into penal substitution. 34. For ‘representative’, cf. M. D. Hooker, art. cit., 358, and G. W. H. Lampe, Reconciliation in Christ, Longmans, London (1956) chapter 3; for ‘first-fruits’, cf. D. F. H. Whiteley, The Theology of St. Paul, Blackwell, Oxford (1964) 132ff. The preferred usage of these authors seems to reflect both awareness of solidarity between Christ and us and also failure to recognize that what forgiveness rests on is Christ’s vicarious sin-bearing, as distinct from the new obedience to which, in Dr. Hooker’s phrase, we are ‘lifted’ by Christ’s action. 35. Cf. pp. 22-25 above. 36. Is 53:6. J. S. Whale observes that this Servant-song ‘makes twelve distinct and explicit statements that the Servant suffers the pena1ty of other men’s sins: not only vicarious suffering but penal substitution is the plain meaning of its fourth, fifth and sixth verses. These may not be precise statement of Western forensic ideas’ - and our earlier argument prompts the comment, a good job too! - ‘but they are clearly connected with penalty, inflicted through various forms of punishment which the Servant endured on other men’s behalf and in their stead, because the Lord so ordained. This legal or law-court metaphor of atonement may be stated positively or negatively: either as penalty which the Redeemer takes upon himself, or as acquittal which sets the prisoner free. But in either way of stating it the connotation is substitutionary: In my place condemned he stood; Scaled my pardon with his blood’ (op. cit., pp. 69f.) 37. Cf. Anglican Article XI: ‘We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings.’ 38. Cf. Rom 1:6, 7; 8:28, 30; 9:11, 24 1 Cor 1:9, 24, 26 Gal 1:15; Eph 4:4; 1 Thess 2:12; 5:24; 2 Thess 2:14; 2 Tim 1:9; John 1:12f., 3:3-15; 1 John 5:1. 39. ‘Unless we believe in the final restoration of all mankind, we cannot have an unlimited atonement. On the premise that some perish eternally we are shut to one of two alternatives - a limited efficacy or a limited extent; there is no such thing as an unlimited atonement’ (John Murray, The Atonement, Presbyterian and Reformed, Philadelphia (1962) 27). 40. Cf. W. Cunningham, Historical Theology, Banner of Truth, London (1960) II. 337, 370; C. Hodge, Systematic Theology, Nelson, London (1974) II. 544-562. The classical anti-Arminian polemic on the atonement remains John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1648: Work, ed. W. Goold, Banner of Truth, London (1968) X. 139ff.), on the argumentation of which J. McLeod Campbell commented: ‘As addressed to those who agreed with him as to the nature of the atonement, while differing with him as to the extent of its reference, this seems unanswerable’ (The Nature of the Atonement, 4th ed., Macmillan, London (1873) 51). 41. Thus, in The Atonement (1868) A. A. Hodge, while speaking freely, as his Reformed predecessors did, of Christ as our substitute in a strict sense under God’s penal law, complained that in theology the word ‘substitution’ had no fixed meaning, and organized his exposition round the idea of ‘satisfaction’, which he claimed was more precise than ‘atonement’ and was the word ‘habitually used by all the Reformers in all the creeds and great classical

55 theological writings of the seventeenth century, both Lutheran and Reformed’ (31ff., 37f.). By contrast the I.V.F- U.C.C.F. Basis (1922) speaks of ‘redemption from the guilt, penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death (as our Representative and Substitute) of Jesus Christ’, not mentioning satisfaction at all, and L. Berkhof’s textbook presents Hodge’s view, which it accepts entirely, as ‘the penal substitutionary or satisfaction doctrine’ (Systematic Theology, 373). 42. Cf. Rom 8:28-39; Eph 1:3-14; 5:25-27; John 6:37-45; 10:11-16, 27-29; 17:6-26. 43. Works,, X. 269. To construe Owen’s statement of equivalence between what threatened us and what Christ endured in ‘quantitative’ terms, as if some calculus of penal pain was being applied, would be a misunderstanding, though admittedly one which Owen’s constant reliance on the model of payment invites, and against which he did not guard. But Denney’s statement expresses what Owen means. 44. Edwards, Works, ed. E. Hickman, Banner of Truth, London (1975) II. 575. Cf. Luther: ‘Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed conscience that tasted eternal wrath;’ ‘it was not a game, or a joke, or play- acting when he said, “Thou hast forsaken me”; for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a sinner is forsaken” (Werke, 5. 602, 605); and Calvin: ‘he bore in his soul the dreadful torments of a condemned and lost man’ (Inst. 11. xvi. 10). Thus Calvin explained Christ’s descent into hell: hell means Godforsakenness, and the descent took place during the hours on the cross. Jesus’ cry of dereliction has been seriously explained as voicing (a) depressive delusion, (b) genuine perplexity, (c) an ‘as if’ feeling, (d) trust in God (because Jesus quotes the first words of Psalm 22; which ends with trust triumphant), (e) a repressed thought forcing its way into the open (so that the cry was a Freudian lapse), (f) a truth which Jesus wanted men to know. Surely only the last view can be taken seriously as either exegesis or theology. For a compelling discussion, cf. Leon Morris, op. cit., 41-49). 45. C. F. D. Moule is right to say that costly forgiving love which1 in the interests of the offender’s personhood, requires him to face and meet his responsibility evokes a burning desire to make reparation and to share the burdens of the one who forgave him. . . . The original self-concern which, in the process of repentance, is transformed into a concern for the one he has injured, makes the penitent eager to lavish on the one who forgives him all that he has and is.’ It is certainly right to replicate God’s forgiveness of our sins in terms of this model; though whether Moule is also right to dismiss God’s justice non-retributively and to eliminate penal satisfaction and to dismiss New Testament references to God’s wrath and punishment as atavistic survivals and ‘anomalies’ is quite another question (‘The Theology of Forgiveness’, in From Fear to Faith: Studies of Suffering and Wholeness, ed Norman Autton, SPCK, London (1971) 61-72; esp. 66f., 72). 46. Op. cit., 55. 47. Owen, Works, X. 284. 48. See on this Leon Morris, op. cit., ch. 10, 364-419. 49. A. M. Hunter, The Words and Works of Jesus, SCM, London (1950) 100. 50. A. M. Hunter, Interpreting Paul’s Gospel, SCM, London (1954) 31f

EDITOR'S NOTE This essay came from Packer's Tyndale Biblical Theology Lecture, "What Did the Cross Achieve?" (1973), Used by permission of Ty- ndale House Cambridge.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR J. I. Packer is a British-born Christian theologian in the low church Anglican and Reformed traditions.

56 Four Questions to Ask about the Atonement

Stephen J. Wellum

he doctrine of penal substitution is under attack today— and that’s an understatement. From voices outside of evan- Tgelical theology to those within, the historic Reformation view of the cross is claimed to be a “modern” invention from the cultural West. Others criticize the doctrine as sanctioning violence, privileging divine retributive justice over God’s love, condo- ning a form of divine child abuse, reducing Scripture’s polychro- me presentation of the cross to a lifeless monochrome, being too “legal” in orientation, and so on. All of these charges are not new. All of them have been argued since the end of the 16th century, and all of them are false. Yet such charges reflect the corrosive effects of false ideas on theology and a failure to account for how the Bible, on its own terms, inter- prets the cross. Given the limitations of this article, I cannot fully respond to these charges. Instead, I will briefly state four truths that unpack the biblical-theological rationale of penal substitution. In so doing, my goal is to explain why penal substitution should be embraced as God’s good news for sinners.

57 Four Questions to Get Right It is only in viewing Christ as our penal substitute that we truly understand the depth of God’s holy love for us, the horrendous nature of our sin before God, and the glory of our substitute — Jesus Christ our Lord — whose obedient life and penal death achieved our right standing before God and the full forgiveness of our sins. Let us now turn to these truths that are crucial to affirm and that lead us to glory in our Lord Jesus Christ as our penal substitute.

1. WHO IS GOD? First, we must get right who God is as our triune Creator-Cove- nant Lord. Mark it well: debates over the nature of the atonement are first and foremost doctrine of God debates. If our view of God is sub-biblical, we will never get the cross right. From the opening verses of Scripture, God is presented as eternal, a se (life from himself), holy love, righteous, and good — the triune God who is complete in himself and who needs nothing from us (Genesis 1–2; Psalm 50:12–14; Isaiah 6:1–3; Acts 17:24–25; Revela- tion 4:8–11). One crucial implication of this description is that God, in his very nature, is the moral standard of the universe. This is why we must not think of God’s law as something external to him that he may relax at will. Instead, the triune God of Scripture is the law; his will and nature determine what is right and wrong. This view of God is often forgotten in today’s discussion of the atonement. Following the “New Perspective on Paul,” some argue that God’s justice/righteousness is only “God’s covenant faithfulness,” that is, God remaining true to his promises. No doubt this is true. However, what this view fails to see is that “righteousness-justice-holiness” is first tied to God’s nature as God. That is why, in light of sin, God, who is the law, cannot overlook our sin. God’s holy justice demands that he not only punish all

58 sin, but also, if he graciously chooses to justify the ungodly (Ro- mans 4:5), he must do so by fully satisfying his own righteous, holy moral demand. Thus, given our sin and God’s gracious choice to redeem us, the question that emerges across redemptive history is this: How will God demonstrate his holy justice and covenant love and remain true to himself? The answer is only found in the Father’s gift of his Son, Jesus’s obedient life and substitutionary death, that results in our justification before God in Christ (Ro- mans 3:21–26).

2. WHO IS MAN? Second, we must get right who humans are as God’s image-sons created to be in covenant relationship with God. Specifically, we must grasp who Adam is, not only as a historic person, but also as the covenant representative/head of the human race (Romans 5:12–21; 1 Corinthians 15:21–22). Why is this significant? Because in creation, our triune Crea- tor-Covenant God sets the conditions of the covenant and rightly demands from Adam (and all of us) total trust, love, and obedience — a truth reflected in God’s first command. But the flip side is also true: If there is covenant disobedience, given who God is, there is also his holy judgment against our sin that results in the penalty of physical and spiritual death (Genesis 2:15–17; cf. Ro- mans 6:23).

3. HOW CAN GOD JUSTIFY SINNERS? Third, we must get right the serious problem of our sin before God. Sadly, Adam did not love God with full covenant devotion. Instead, he disobeyed God, thus bringing sin, death, and God’s curse into the world. In the Bible’s storyline, Adam’s sin changes everything!

59 From Genesis 3 forward, “in Adam,” the entire human race becomes guilty, corrupted, condemned, and under the judicial sentence of death (Genesis 3; Romans 5:12–21; Ephesians 2:1–3). If God is going to redeem, which he has graciously promised to do (Genesis 3:15), how is he going to do it? Remember, given who God is in all of his moral perfection, and given that he is the standard of holy justice who will not deny himself, how will God declare sinners justified before him apart from the full satisfaction of his moral demand? God must punish sin and execute perfect justice because he is holy, just, and good. He cannot overlook our sin nor relax the demands of his justice, and in truth, thankfully so! But to justify us, our sin must be fully atoned. How, then, can God punish our sin, satisfy his own righteous demand, and justify sinners? Add to this point: To undo, reverse, and pay for Adam’s sin, we need someone who will come from the human race and identify with us (Genesis 3:15), render our required covenantal obedience, and pay the penalty for our sin. We need someone who will become our covenant representative and substitute, and by his obedient life and penal death secure our justification before God. And wonder of wonders, Scripture gloriously announces that there is one man — and only one — who can do this for us, namely our Lord Jesus Christ (Hebrews 2:5–18).

4. WHO IS JESUS? Fourth, we must get right who Jesus is, what he does for us, and that he alone can redeem, reconcile, and justify us before God. Who is the Jesus of the Bible? In short, he is God the Son incarnate, the second person of the triune Godhead. He is no abused child or some third-party individual who stands independent of God. We cannot think of his atoning work apart from thinking of the entire triune God accomplishing our salvation.

60 Furthermore, as the eternal Son, eternally loved of his Father and the Spirit, in God’s plan, he voluntarily took on the role of becoming our Redeemer. And in his incarnation, he identified with us in order to represent us before God (Hebrews 5:1). In his obedient human life, Jesus, as the Mediator of the new covenant, obeyed for us as our legal covenant representative. In his obedient death, Jesus, as the divine Son, satisfied his own righteous demand against us by bearing the penalty of our sin as our substitute (Romans 5:18–19; Philippians 2:6–11; Hebrews 5:1–10). And in doing all of this, the Father’s love was revealed in Jesus’s penal substitution because of who Jesus is as the Son incarnate, the Last Adam, and the only Mediator of God’s people (Romans 5:8–11).

DON’T GET BORED WITH THE GOSPEL The truth of the matter is this: penal substitution is not a view to be replaced by something “better” or dismissed as a relic of the past. There is no greater news than this: Christ Jesus, as the divine Son incarnate, perfectly meets our need before God by his obedient life and substitutionary death. In Christ the triune love of God is gloriously revealed because in Christ we receive the gift of righteousness which is now ours by faith in him. In union with his people, Christ, as our new covenant head, obeys in our place, dies our death, and satisfies divine justice, which is evidenced in his glorious resurrection. As a result, by faith alone, in Christ alone, his righteousness is ours — now and forever (Romans 8:1; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Gala- tians 3:13). By faith-union in Christ, we stand complete: justified before God by the forgiveness of our sins and clothed in his righteousness (Romans 4:1–8; 5:1–2). Following the Bible’s teaching on this matter, may we learn anew to say with Paul, “For I decided to know nothing . . . except Jesus Christ and him cruci-

61 fied” (1 Corinthians 2:2). “Thanks be to God for his inexpressi- ble gift!” (2 Corinthians 9:15).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Stephen J. Wellum is a Professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky and editor of the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology.

EDITOR’S NOTE This article originally appeared at Desiring God.

62 What Is Penal Substitution?

Jarvis J. Williams

ccording to the apostle Paul, the death and resurrection of Jesus are the “first things” of the gospel (1 Cor A15:3–4).1 Christians have debated both of these first things throughout the history of the church. Regarding Jesus’ death, they have debated whether the New Testament teaches penal substitution and (if so) whether penal substitution should be understood as the central atonement model in the New Tes- tament.2 Recent work on substitution has simply argued for the presence of substitution in the New Testament with specific reference to selected texts in Paul’s letters.3 In this article, I argue that the New

1 Unless otherwise indicated, translations of biblical texts are my own. 2 For examples, see essays in James Beilby and Paul R. Eddy (eds.), The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006); Steve Jeffery, Mike Ovey, and Andrew Sach, Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 2007); J.I. Packer and Mark Dever, In My Place Condemned He Stood: Celebrating the Glory of the Atonement (Wheaton: Crossway, 2007). 3 E.g. Simon J. Gathercole, Defending Substitution: An Essay on Atonement in Paul (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2015). Gathercole’s work is helpful since he engages some of the challenges to substitution in biblical scholarship and since he responds to each challenge with clear and accessible exegesis of selected texts. He also provides some practical application of the doctrine of substitution to the Christian life.

63 Testament teaches Jesus’ death was a penal substitute for sinners. Elsewhere I defined penal substitution in the following way:

Jesus died a violent, substitutionary death to be a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of Jews and Gentiles. By this death, Jesus took upon himself God’s righteous judgment and wrath against the sins of those for whom he died. By dying as their penal substitute, Jesus paid the penalty for their sins, and he therefore both propitiated God’s wrath against their sins and expiated their sins so that the sins of Jews and Gentiles would be forgiven and so that they would be justified by faith, forgiven of their sins, reconciled to God, reconciled to each other, participate in the future resurrection, and saved from God’s wrath. 4

I support the above thesis and definition by analyzing Romans 5:6–10. I make one primary argument from the preceding text to support my thesis. Namely, Jesus died for sinners to justify them by faith, to reconcile them to God, and to save them from God’s eschatological wrath.

THE IMMEDIATE CONTEXT OF ROMANS 5:6–10 Paul’s remarks about Jesus’ death in Romans 5:6–10 occur in the context of providing a reason why Christians have hope in suffering. In Romans 5:1–5, Paul says Christians have hope in suffering “because we have been justified by faith,” and conse- quently “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand” (5:1–2). The theological truth of our right standing before God because of justification by faith in Christ leads Paul to say Christians can “boast” in God when they suffer (v. 3), because suffering produces perseverance (v. 3), perseverance pro-

4 With a few modifications, quote comes from Jarvis J. Williams, “Violent Atonement: The Foundation of Paul’s Soteriology in Romans.” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 53/3 (September 2010): 579-99.

64 duces tested and proven character (v. 4), and tested and proven character produce hope (v. 5). Paul quickly declares that hope will not put the hopeful to shame in the judgment (v. 5), because all who have love for God through Christ likewise have the Holy Spirit living in their hearts (v. 5). Then, in verses 6 to 10, Paul gives the undergirding reason why those who have been justified by faith have hope and have the Spirit living in their hearts: Christ died for their sins to give them specific saving benefits.

JESUS’ DEATH FOR SINNERS AND ITS SAVINGS BENEFITS In Romans 5:6, Paul asserts Jesus died for the weak in the appropriate time while they were “still weak.” The “weak” in verse 6 refers to the “ungodly” in verse 6 and to the “sinners” in verse 8. Humans are conceived in sin because of Adam’s transgression (v. 12), and humans willingly participate in sinful actions (Rom 3:23). Contrary to the person who dies a noble or patriotic death for a righteous or good cause (5:7), Jesus died for “weak” and “ungodly” “sinners” (vv. 6, 8). His death for sinners achieves justification (v. 9), reconciliation (v. 10), and salvation (v. 9) for those for whom he died. In Romans 5:9, Paul infers from his remarks in verse 8 that God’s love for sinners is chiefly seen by means of Jesus’ death for them while they were still in a state of sin. In verse 9, Paul says, “therefore,” future deliverance from God’s wrath is certain “because we have been justified by his blood.” Jesus’ penal substitutionary death is evident here not simply because Paul uses the phrase “for us” when he refers to Jesus’ death, but because Jesus’ sacrificial death “for us” justifies us in God’s law-court by faith and guarantees future deliverance from God’s wrath. Christians have debated justification for centuries. The -im portant point for my thesis is God declares “weak” and “un-

65 godly” “sinners” not guilty. That is, he justifies them by faith because he does not reckon their transgressions against them (Rom. 4:6–8) since Jesus’ blood purchases the justification of all sinners who have faith in Christ (5:9; cf. 3:21–4:25). His death for them, which provides both forgiveness of sins (hence, the reference to blood) and justification (cf. also Rom 3:24–25; 5:9), also guarantees deliverance from God’s future wrath (i.e. salvation) (5:9), because Jesus died for sinners while they were sinners. In the words of 2 Corinthians 5:21: “God made him who knew no sin to become sin for us…” Or in the words of Ro- mans 8:4: God made Jesus a sin-offering and condemned sin in Jesus’ flesh so that “the righteous requirement of the law would be fulfilled in us who are not walking according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” The concept of salvation (or soteriology) in Paul’s theology is complex. For the purpose of this article, I use the term salvation to refer to God’s future deliverance of his people from his eschatological wrath. Jesus purchased this deliverance by taking upon himself the penalty of those sinners for whom he died so that they would be declared not guilty in the day of judgment because God reckons to their account the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ (Rom. 4:1–25). His death for sinners then in turn results in God’s deliverance of those for whom Jesus died from God’s final distribution of wrath at the end of history, a wrath that is stored up for all sinners who refuse to trust in Jesus by faith (cf. Rom 2:7–10). Prior to Jesus’ wrath-bearing death for our sins, sinners hated God (Rom 5:10) and God hated them (Ps 5:5). This is why Paul says “we were enemies” prior to our becoming reconciled to God through the death of his son (Rom 5:10). But because Jesus died for our sins and took upon himself our wrath that we deserved, the “weak” and “ungodly” “sinners” and “enemies” of God now experience soteriological peace, which will result in exoneration

66 in God’s law court and deliverance from God’s wrath on the last day (Rom 5:10). Because Jesus suffered God’s wrath for us, those who are justified by faith in Christ will receive the benefits of his saving death both now and in the age to come. CONCLUSION Jesus died for sinners to be their penal substitute. Future justification and salvation have already been realized now in the current age by faith in the lives of every Christian because Jesus died as our penal substitute and because God raised him from the dead (Rom 5:10; cf. 4:24–25). Evidence of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the life-giving and indwelling presence and power of the Spirit living in the hearts of and flowing freely by specific deeds of obedience in the lives of everyone who has been justified by faith (Rom 5:6; 8:1–11; cf. Gal 2:16; 3:13–14; 4:4–6; 5:16, 22). May every preacher far and near preach with absolute clarity the penal substitutionary nature of Jesus’ death for sinners scattered throughout the world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jarvis J. Williams is associate professor of New Testament Inter- pretation at Southern Seminary. He is also a member of Clifton Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. You can follow him on Twitter at @drjjwilliams.

67 Did Jesus Affirm Penal Substitutionary Atonement?

Bobby Scott

incent Taylor wisely conceded, “The attempt to say how Jesus interpreted his death is an ambitious inquiry. No Vapology is needed if it is accomplished only in part.”5 Let me add my hearty “Amen” to Taylor’s concession as I invite you to explore with me the significance of Jesus’ death in his own words. To be sure, Jesus’ words are at times opaque, but they are nevertheless full of meaning—meaning that is made clearer when interpreted in the context of his entire ministry and when connected to the reverberating echoes of the metanarrative of the Bible. Theologians have variously defined the meaning of Jesus’ death. This article will contend that Jesus expressed his death in terms of a penal substitutionary atonement.6 Simply put, this means, “On the cross Christ took our place (substitution) and bore the equi-

5 Vincent Taylor The Cross of Christ (London; McMillan & Co LTD, 1956), 11. 6 Central to Jesus’ work on the cross is His penal substitutionary atonement, but it is not limited to that. Jesus speaks of His death in other motifs as well such as cosmic, and battle. See the concluding paragraph.

68 valent punishment for our sins (penal), thereby satisfying the just demands of the law and appeasing God’s wrath (atonement).”7 This article will survey Jesus’ words from his youth to the cross in an attempt to demonstrate this thesis.

1ST AS AN ADULT, JESUS EMBRACES HIS MISSIONAL LIFE FOR HIS FATHER. (LUKE 2:40–52) The boy Jesus’ words to his mother and Joseph when he stayed behind on their Passover pilgrimage are stunning: “Why is it that you were looking for Me? Did you [plural] not know that I had to [out of absolute necessity because of my spiritual responsibility] be in my [not “our”] Father’s house?” By using an inclusio, a literary device in which the author opens and closes a passage with the same words (in this case, references to Jesus’ maturation, 2:40 and 2:52), Luke points the reader to the focus of the text. This inclusio alerts the reader to what Mary misses and to what Jesus implies by what he says: He had grown up! He was fully accountable to his Father. In so many words, Jesus is re- minding his mother that his Father sent him to take on the fullness of humanity in order to accomplish a mission. So Jesus consistently says things like . . . “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work” (John 4:34 [c.p., John 17:4]). With this focus, Jesus enters and continues his preaching ministry.

2ND JESUS REVEALS HIS IDENTITY AS THE SERVANT IN HIS INAUGURAL SERMON. (LUKE 4:16–21) I hope that in the new heaven and the new earth there’s a way to see the awesome events in biblical history in high definition. I’d love to see the parting of the Red Sea, and I’d wait all day in line to see the faces of the people in the synagogue when Jesus read the scroll of Isaiah 61:1–2: 7 Bruce Demarest The Cross and Salvation (Wheaton; Crossway Books, 1997), 159. Parentheses are mine.

69 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

I’d love to see how they respond when he concludes, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). Jesus claims to those in the synagogue that he is the prophesied, God-anointed agent of salvation. His claim implies that he is the One who will bring the gospel; he will bring deliverance; he will undo the curse; he will overthrow the enemies of God; he will bring the promised blessings. No doubt the confusion in his hearers’ minds was as palpable as the tension in the air. Whether the Servant of God was the strong conquering right arm of God (Isa 49), the suffering Servant of God (Isa 53), or both, his hearers were left pondering the meaning of his words. But there can be no doubt that to Jesus, his work and identity as the Servant of God was clear. By identifying himself as the divine Son of Man (Matt 26:64), Jesus is consciously affirming that he would accomplish the prophesied and promised work of salvation (Dan 7:13-14)—the establishment of the kingdom of God (Mark 1:15–16). Essential to his teaching about the accomplishment of this mission is what He taught about His death.

3RD JESUS REVEALS HIS MISSION: TO DIE A SUBSTITUTIONARY DEATH. The Gospel writers did not put the theology of atonement in Jesus’ mouth. At times, they admittedly confessed they didn’t unders-

70 tand Jesus’ teachings on his death and resurrection (John 2:19, 22). They even rebuked him for saying that he would die (Matt 16:22). It’s clear that the disciples were unclear on the need for the Servant of God to suffer in order to secure their salvation (Luke 24:25–26). A Son of David who conquers through suffering was apparently incongruent to them (Mark 9:12), but this is precisely how Jesus said he would accomplish his mission. The Christian faith is an exclusive faith in Jesus’ atoning work, not in spite of him, but because of him. As a rabbi, Jes- us taught the disciples what they had not perceived. Through his post-resurrection appearances and his gift of the Holy Spirit, they would later come to understand his message and his work as the Good News. From his first sermon until he yielded his life to the Father on the cross, Jesus expressed that he came to die. In His words, He came for that hour (John 4:21; 5:25, 28; 12:23; 16:32). The crowning achievement of his ministry would be the cross: “Now My soul has become troubled; and what shall I say, ‘Father, save Me from this hour’? But for this purpose I came to this hour” (John 12:27). Jesus boldly stated the purpose of His death: “I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep” (John 10:11). Furthermore, he claimed that the purpose of his death was to save his sheep from the consequences of sin—death. “Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps My word he will never see death” (John 8:51). The cross, in Jesus’ words, is summed up eloquently by John Owen: “The Death of Death in the Death of Christ”—and all of it for his sheep. Many Jesus scholars dispute that Jesus taught his death was a substitutionary atonement. However, Mark records Jesus as saying, “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for8 many” (Mark 10:45). One

8 Crucial in Jesus’ teaching about His death is how He used the prepositions anti, “for” (Mark 10:45) and hyper,

71 cannot dismiss these words without directly attacking the inspiration and authority of Scripture. Furthermore, Jesus declared that he would send the Holy Spirit to the apostles for the express purpose of causing them to remember his teachings: “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said to you” (John 14:26). From the beginning, Jesus spoke about his death. However, toward the end of his ministry, he emphasized its significance more and more .

4TH JESUS REVEALS THAT HIS DEATH WAS PROPITIATORY. Finally, let me suggest two lines of thinking that support that Jesus saw his own death as propitiatory, that is, as bearing the wrath of God. First, Jesus taught that the wrath of God was against sinners, not just against sin. Jesus taught that God should be feared because he was able to destroy both soul and body in hell (Matt 10:28). Jesus furthermore taught, “If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life crippled, than, having your two hands, to go into hell, into the unquenchable fire” (Mark 9:43). It seems fair, then, to conclude that according to Jesus, those who sin will face God in his righteous wrath, and that is a te- rrifying prospect. The second line of reasoning, I would suggest, is Jesus’ agony in the Garden. Jesus prophesied that “The Son of Man must suffer many things” (Luke 9:22). He knew that he would be rejected by his Father. He knew that he would have to endure unimaginable suffering. He also knew that his suffering would come from more than the hands of men. Luke records Jesus’ agonizing prayer in the Garden:

“instead of” (John 10:11). They both express substitution.

72 And he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, and knelt down and prayed, saying, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Ne- vertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” And there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him. And being in agony he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground. (Luke 22:41–44)

Both Jesus’ words and actions in the Garden of Gethsemane are completely shocking. The divine Son of God is seen trembling while sweating drops of blood at the prospect of drinking the cup of God. The strain on the eternal love relationship between the Father and the Son can only be attributed to that which was in the cup—the cup that the Father requires the Son to drink in full. What’s in the cup? The Old Testament alludes to such a cup, and Jesus’ agonizing plea leads the reader to conclude that the cup must be the cup that is filled with the wrath of God against sinners. “Upon the wicked he will rain snares; fire and brimstone and burning wind will be the portion of their cup” (Psa. 11:6 [c.p., Ps 75:8–9; Isa 51:17–23]). The horror of the cross isn’t what wicked men did to Jesus. The horror of the cross is witnessing Jesus pay the debt that we owed to the Father. Jesus stood in the sinner’s place, condemned to suffer the wrath we deserved. As he yielded up his Spirit to his Father, he exclaimed that he had now paid our sin-debt in full: “It is finished!” (John 19:30). The Father had heard the cry of his Son—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?—and as he suffered in our stead, the Father answered with acceptance and favor.

CONCLUSION With Vincent Taylor’s concession as a backdrop, this article aimed to answer with Jesus’ words, “Why in the world was the sinless Son of God dying a criminal’s death on a cruel cross?” It conclu-

73 des that it is not a fair reading of the Gospels to suggest that the penal substitutionary death of Jesus has been theologized by the Gospel writers and then put back into the mouth of Jesus. While it’s right to acknowledge that there are limits to what we can know about the inner conscious mind of the Son of God, it’s also true that believers can and should learn what Jesus said and by faith believe it, teach it, and defend it. In Jesus’ own words, God would bring about a profound re- versal of fortune. Through his atoning penal substitutionary death, the crucified Son of Man accomplished exactly what he said he would at the beginning of his ministry. He accomplished the redemption of his people, was exalted as Lord of all, was granted all power in Heaven and earth (Matt 28:18–20), and in the eschaton he will make all things new (Rev. 21:5). Therefore, we can by faith embrace and teach from Jesus’ words what he taught—God’s glorious good news, the gospel—that is all about who Jesus said he is, what he said he would do, how he said he would do it, and what he actually accomplished.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Bobby Scott is a co-pastor of Community of Faith Bible Church.

74 20 Quotes from It Is Well: Expositions on Substitutionary Atonement

Mark Dever

Michael Lawrence

rom time to time I’ve been asked, “Where is the cross in your church?” People look around our 1911 meeting house Fand find no cross there. You won’t find it in gold, silver, or wood. You won’t find it embroidered on a banner or carved in the paneling. It’s nowhere on the pulpit or on the table. Where is it? It’s there. It’s there at the heart of our church. It’s in the Bible. It’s in the sermons. It’s in the songs and the prayers. And it’s in the hearts of the people. (12)

75 The truth of the Word, the cross in the Bible, explodes into glorious joy at the foundation and heart of our life together as a church. When we experience that solemn joy, that deep delight, that loud celebration together, whether we’re at the Lord’s Table or simply rejoicing after confessing our sins in prayer, the cross is seen to be the center of our church. (13)

You and I need deliverance from bondage to sin and from the fatal judgment of God, and that deliverance will come only through the blood of the firstborn lamb without blemish. Just as the Passover lamb was a substitute for sinners, so too is the Lamb of God. (21)

The judgment on Egypt was a terrible preview of the judgment that is to come on all of us spiritually. God is a good God, and because of that, he will judge us. In fact, God’s judgment reminds us of his sovereignty, his goodness, and our need for a savior. How clearly do you see that? Do you see why God’s very goodness means that he must judge you? (26)

It’s amazing when you think about it that God’s meeting place with man, the place where atonement would be made, was in the very symbol of his holiness and righteousness. This room, separated physically and by rules—with the ark of the covenant, the bowing cherubim, the law written by God’s own hand—is where not only God’s righteousness and holiness but also his mercy would be shown most clearly. (38)

So this is the picture: Israel had sinned against God. And what should be done about that? How could so many people find forgiveness? Through atonement. Through the death of a substitute in their place, a sacrifice that would take the penalty due to them. And why would God teach people such a thing?

76 Because he was preparing them to understand the great truth, as Hebrews says, that “Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people.” (41)

Jesus Christ is the true High Priest of his people. He alone has entered behind the curtain and seen God face-to-face. He has brought the blood of the Lamb, his own blood, into God’s presence, and he has done so once and for all time, never to be repeated. (48) Do you see this amazing combination? God’s will and the servant’s willingness. This is no cosmic child abuse of a heavenly Fa- ther gone terribly wrong, abusing his trembling child who shrinks back from his Father’s strokes. This is the eternal, triune God— Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—determining from eternity past that he would deal with our sins. (55)

He [Jesus] didn’t just die on behalf of or for the benefit of, but he literally died in their stead, or in their place. They deserved death, but because he has died for them, now they will not die. (73-74)

How can we measure the power of Christ’s death? Surely it’s sufficient for the salvation of all, if you want to ask the question that way, but it is, as the theologians say, efficient for the salvation of “many.” Christ knew those for whom he was laying down his life, and they were the same ones that the Father had elected, the ones to whom he would give the gifts of repentance and faith and who the Spirit would regenerate. (75)

Jesus died spiritually before he died physically. I do not mean that some part of the divine nature died. Nor do I mean that the Trinity itself was torn apart. Rather, I mean that on the cross Jes- us Christ experienced the death that Adam and Eve experienced immediately upon their rebellion in the garden and the death that

77 you and I are all born into. He experienced in the consciousness of the God-man what it means for God to be opposed to those who are by nature objects of his wrath. (88)

According to Jesus, that bronze serpent in the desert was just a picture of the true atonement that would be made when he was lifted up on the cross, not merely as a symbol or emblem of our judgment but as the substitute who would actually suffer our judgment in our stead. (94)

How do we know that God loves the world? We look at the cross. How do we know what God’s love looks like? We look at the cross. On the cross God gave his Son as a sacrifice for a sinful world in full-tilt rebellion against him, and the person God gave for the world wasn’t just anybody; it was his one and only Son, the incarnate Second person of the Trinity, whom the Father had loved from all eternity and with whom he was well pleased. (96)

If Jesus were an unrelated third party to God’s just complaint against us, we might have reason to balk at the apparent injustice of his substitutionary death on the cross for us. But Jesus was no disinterested observer. As the second person of the Godhead in his divinity, he stood in perfect union with God, the very one who has the complaint. As fully man in his humanity, he stands in perfect solidarity with us, being like us in every way except without sin. (111)

Sometimes people will, in ignorance, represent the Christian gospel as a loving Son persuading an unwilling Father to show mercy. But that is not what the Bible teaches. God the Father was not reluctant. He planned our salvation and initiated it. He acted. It was his gift. (121)

78 We can only be saved from the penalty our sins deserved by the very one we’ve sinned against—God himself.” (122)

Brothers and sisters, if you are justified, you understand that it’s not that God has merely let you off because the penalty has been paid, but that there is no longer any grounds for him to condemn you. All those grounds have been met and exhausted by Christ. Therefore, do not live trembling on the verge of hell. Live trembling on the verge of heaven, knowing that there is no longer any charge to be made against you, because Christ has taken it all. (123)

Jesus Christ came to save us. He came to save us from ourselves and from our own self-made disaster of a life. Most fun- damentally, he came to save us from himself, from God’s sure wrath against us for our sins—sins that hurt us and others, sins that divide and destroy, sins that dishonor the God who made us. (173)

The contrast is striking. We deserve the curse. He did not. We could not escape the curse on our own. He took it on voluntarily. We are born into the curse and daily confirm the rightness of it. He had to become a curse, for it had no natural hold on him. But the most important contrast is that we could never satisfy the curse. We, in fact can never be punished as much as our sins deserve. But he not only satisfied the curse; he exhausted it. (189)

God is the ultimate focus of Christ’s death on the cross. Yes, Jesus died for sins and for unrighteousness, but ultimately Jesus died for God and his glory. For when Christ brings us to God, he brings us into a right relationship with God. It’s as if the universe is set back where it should be—a relationship in which he

79 is the center and we orbit around him in a safe proximity and nearness, a relationship in which his glory is the point and we find our joy and meaning in being a display ofhis worth rather than our own. (215)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mark Dever is the senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D. C., and the President of 9Marks. You can find him on Twitter at @MarkDever.

Michael Lawrence is the senior pastor of Hinson Baptist Church in Portland, Oregon. You can find him on Twitter at @pdxtml.

80 Answering 4 Common Objections to PSA

Stephen J. Wellum

n his classic book, The Cross of Christ (IVP, 2006), John Stott famously wrote: “At the root of every caricature of the cross Ithere lies a distorted Christology” (159). I couldn’t agree more, yet it’s crucial to remember that a true Christology is also dependent on a correct theology proper. Thus, it’s more precise to say: “At the root of every caricature of the cross is a distorted doctrine of God.” If we get God wrong, we will never grasp the problem of sin, and its glorious solution in Christ and his cross. In fact, all common objections to penal substitutionary atonement (PSA) are ultimately rooted in sub-biblical ideas regarding the triune God of Scripture.

WHO IS THE TRIUNE GOD? In brief, the God of the Bible is the triune Creator-covenant Lord. As triune, the Father, Son, and Spirit have eternally shared fully and equally the one, identical divine nature in perfect love and communication (John 1:1; 17:5). Also, in every divine

81 action such as creation, revelation, and redemption, the divine persons act inseparably according to their eternal person-relations. There is never a divine action that is not triune, including our redemption in Christ and his cross. Furthermore, as the triune Creator, God is independent and self-sufficient, not merely in his existence and knowledge, but also as the moral standard of the universe. Unlike creatures, God’s moral character and justice is grounded in himself. In Scripture, God’s independence or aseity is closely associated with his holiness (Exo. 3:6–6; 19:23–25; Lev. 11:44; 19:1; Isa. 6:1- 5; 57:15; Heb. 12:28; 1 John 1:5). God in his self-sufficiency and moral perfection is the ultimate criterion of rightness and justice which entails that the triune God of holy love is the law, and as such, he always acts consistently with himself. For this reason, sin before this God is serious. God in his holiness is “too pure to behold evil” and unable to tolerate wrong (Hab. 1:12-13; cf. Isa 1:4–20; 35:8; 59:1–2). This is why, given who God is, he cannot tolerate sin; he must act in holy justice. God remains true to himself, and as such, our sin separa- tes us from him (Isa 59:1–2). As the righteous God, he upholds his own holiness and acts against every violation of it, which also results in divine wrath, i.e., his holy reaction to evil (Rom 1:18–32; 2:8–16). God’s wrath, unlike his holiness, is not an in- ternal perfection; rather it is a function of his holiness against sin. Where there is no sin, there is no wrath, but there is always holiness. But where the holy God confronts his creatures in their rebellion, there must be wrath. To dilute God’s wrath is to dimi- nish God’s holiness and self-sufficiency along with the exercise of his holiness in justice. No doubt, alongside God’s holiness is his love, and Scripture never pits one against the other. Yet for God to forgive us of our sins, he must satisfy his own righteous demand, which is what he has done in Christ’s cross. The supreme display of God’s love is the

82 Father giving his own Son as our propitiation, which turns back his own wrath against us and satisfies the demands of justice on our behalf (1 John 2:1–2; 4:8–10; cf. Rom 5:8). In the cross, we see the greatest demonstration of God’s holy-justice and love. It’s where he remains just and the justifier of those who have faith in Christ Jesus (Rom 3:21–26). With this basic sketch of who God is in place, we can now think through four common objections to PSA, which at their heart, all have some distorted view of God.

1. WHY CAN’T GOD JUST FORGIVE US? First, why can’t God simply forgive sin? After all, we are called to forgive people without demanding payment for sin (Matt 5:38– 48). Why can’t God do the same? Why does Christ have to pay for all of our sins in order for God to forgive us? The answer is, God cannot simply forgive because of who he is as the moral standard of the universe. All of God’s attributes are essential to him, including his holiness, righteousness, and justice. In regard to his justice, God is not like a human judge, who adjudicates a law external to him; instead, God is the law. Our sin is not against an abstract principle or impersonal law, but it’s always against God who is holy and just (Ps. 51:4). So for God to forgive us, he must do so by remaining true to himself. That is why our forgiveness is only possible if the full satisfaction of his moral demand is met. For God to declare sinners justified before him, our Lord Jesus must perfectly obey all of God’s moral demands for us and fully pay for our sin in his substitutionary death (Rom. 3:21–26; 2 Cor. 5:21). For those who stumble over this explanation, think of the alternative. Ultimately, everyone who denies PSA thinks that God can forgive our sins without the full satisfaction of his justice. But to make sense of this, one must deny that God’s holiness and justice

83 are essential to him. However, if this is so, then how is God the moral standard of the universe? Or, appeal is often made to God’s love being greater than his other perfections such as his justice, as if God can forgive us without the full satisfaction of his justice. But this will not do either. God has all of his attributes essentially and inseparably. In forgiving us of our sins, God’s love is not opposed to his justice; instead the very demonstration of God’s love is that in Christ and his cross, God’s own righteous demand is met (1 John 2:2; 4:8–10). These other views pull apart in God what cannot be pulled apart, effectively making his love unjust and his justice unloving. They thereby change God’s very nature. Our triune God is a God of grace and justice, and in our justification, he remains true to himself. God remains the loving, just, and holy one; no sin is overlooked or condoned. Instead, our sin is paid for in full either in Christ or in final judgment when all sin, evil, and death will be destroyed. It is only PSA that allows us to affirm these biblical truths in all their beauty and glory.

2. ISN’T PENAL SUBSTITUTION A WESTERN IDEA? Second, doesn’t PSA depend on Western ideas of retributive justice? Isn’t justice in the Bible more restorative than retributive? This common objection to PSA has at least two problems. First, it fails to recognize how much Scripture has affected “Western” ideas of justice. No doubt, our society has secularized Christian thought over the years, but the idea that retributive justice is only “Western” is simply false. Second, it assumes that those who defend PSA deny any restorative sense to justice, which is also false. But in thinking about justice in Scripture, we must also get the proverbial “horse before the cart.” Let me explain. In Scripture, it is legitimate to think of “justice” and “righteousness” in relation to God’s “covenant faithfulness” or “God making

84 all things right”—hence a restorative sense. After all, God’s righteousness does refer to his saving activity (Pss. 31:1; 36:10; 71:2; Isa. 45:8; 46:13; 51:4–8) defined by covenant relationships. Righ- teousness is often associated with God’s faithfulness tied to his covenant promises. God will execute justice for his people and act to save them. However, since God is holy and just, for him “to make all things right,” he must also punish what is wrong. God is righteous in all his ways (Ps 145:17) because he is the standard of what is right. As the righteous Judge, God punishes sin and holds people accountable for their actions (Ex. 34:6–7; Pss. 9:5–6, 15-20; 94:7–9; Prov 24:12; Rom 1:18–3:20). In fact, final judgment is a reality because God does not allow sin to go unpunished, which is ultimately good news! So, God’s justice is restorative but only because God is just and punishes evil and sin. What is the alternative to viewing God’s justice as retributive? Ultimately, it’s some kind of “moral naturalism,” namely that God creates the world in such a way that sin is dealt with as a natural consequence, or that God upholds the “moral governing” of the universe in some way. But note: this “natural” consequence oc- curs without any judicial act on the part of God, hence a downpla- ying of a retributive sense of justice or that God’s wrath is directed against sin. But this view ultimately undercuts the warrant for objective morality grounded in God’s own nature, which has horrendous implications. Thankfully, the triune God the Bible does not let sin go unpunished; the Judge of all the earth always does what is right (Gen 18:25). 3. IS PENAL SUBSTITUTION A FORM OF “DIVINE CHILD ABUSE”? Third, isn’t PSA essentially an act of divine child abuse? Although this is a common objection to PSA, it assumes such a distorted

85 Christology and theology proper, it’s hard to know where to begin in responding to it. Let me offer three points. First, it ignores the entire context of the Gospels. When it comes to the cross, Jesus was not a child but an adult, indeed the divine Son who willingly and gladly chose to die for us (Mark 8:31; John 15:13; 18:11). Second, it assumes that Jesus is a third-party individual and not the beloved Son of the Father. As God the Son incarnate, Jesus is no mere child or even a mere human. He is the Lord of Glory, and as Lord, he is not a helpless victim. Instead, Jesus is one with the Father and Spirit, loved by the Father, who deliberately chose to do the Father’s will unto death, and who is sovereign in all of his acts (John 10:14–18; Phil. 2:8). Third, it assumes a false view of trinitarian relations. As God the Son, Jesus lived and died in unbroken unity with the Father and Spirit. Again, Jesus is not some third party acting independently of the other two divine persons. There are not three par- ties at the cross (God, Jesus, and us) but two (the triune God and us). The cross demonstrates the Father’s love by the gift of his Son (John 3:16; Rom 5:8). The triune God takes on himself his own righteous demand (Rom 3:25–26). The charge that PSA involves divine child abuse is simply false and a failure to grasp even a basic understanding of the triune God of Scripture.

4. ISN’T TRANSFERRING GUILT TO AN INNOCENT VICTIM UNJUST? Fourth, isn’t it unjust of God to transfer our guilt to an innocent victim? This last common objection involves at least three problems. First, it assumes a human court analogy. No doubt, in human courts, judges adjudicate laws external to them and cannot transfer the sin of a guilty person to an innocent one. Yet, in this case,

86 God as the Judge is the law, and he is the person we have sinned against. He has every right to pronounce our guilt or justification in relation to whether our sin has been paid for or not. Second, it fails to grasp that the one who has taken our place, obeyed all of God’s righteous demands for us, and paid for our sin is God himself in Christ. For sinners to be declared just in Christ, who is the Son incarnate—the very person we have sinned against and whose moral demand is against us—is hardly an unjust transfer of guilt! Third, the objection also fails to grasp how in God’s eternal plan (Ps. 139:16; Eph. 1:4, 11; 1 Pet. 1:20), the Son is appointed as the Mediator of his people, and how in his incarnation and new covenant work for us, Jesus chose to become qualified to represent us and to act as our representative and substitute. As the Son, in his humanity, he stood in our place, rendered our human obedience, and took his own righteous demand on himself for us. There is certainly nothing immoral or unjust here, but only the glory of our triune God in the face of Christ, and the wonder of the truth of the gospel! The divine Son has every right to take our place for it is against him that we have sinned and we owe him everything. The divine Son, along with the entire triune God, is the offended party, andhe has the right to demand satisfaction from us. By choosing to become our Redeemer in his life and death, our Lord Jesus gloriously, graciously, and justly accomplished our eternal salvation.

CONCLUSION I end where I began: At the root of every caricature of PSA is a distorted doctrine of God. If we are to grasp the Bible’s presentation of the cross, we must first grasp who our triune God is. It is only by first gazing on him, in all of his glory, self-sufficiency, love, holiness, and justice, that we will begin to grasp the na-

87 ture of our problem, and its only solution in Christ our penal substitute and new covenant head. Theology truly matters and distorted views of God will always lead to distorted views of the cross and ultimately of the gospel.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Stephen J. Wellum is a Professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky and editor of the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology.

88 Does Penal Substitutionary Atonement Rupture the Trinity?

Kevin DeYoung

ecently, Thomas McCall published an article in Christianity Today entitled “Is the Wrath of God Really Satisfying?” As Ra Christian (and pastor and professor) who believes in penal substitutionary atonement—that Christ died in our place to assuage the wrath of God—I found McCall’s article helpful in places, but also confusing and misleading. After reading it several times, I’m still not sure if McCall is trying to undermine penal substitution, rescue it from abuse, or avoid it altogether. At the very least, the article felt like a poke in the eye to the millions of Christians who believe that Good Friday is good precisely because Christ was stricken, smitten, and afflicted by God for our sake.

89 RUPTURED TRINITY The main burden of McCall’s piece is to show that some popular preaching on the cross is at odds with orthodox Trinitarian theology. According to McCall, “God against God” theories of the atonement imply (or explicitly teach) that God’s Trinitarian life was ruptured on Good Friday. And yet, McCall argues, God could not turn his face away from the Son, because the Father is one with the Son. “To say that the Trinity is broken—even ‘temporarily’—is to imply that God does not exist.” While I’m not convinced that Christ bearing the wrath of God implies a Trinitarian fissure, McCall is right to warn against misreading the cry of dereliction in literalistic fashion, as if the first person of the Trinity was coming to blows with the second person of the Trinity. Whatever else it might mean, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” does not mean that the eternal union of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit was interrupted. We should be careful not to speak of the Son suffering in complete absence from the Father, or speak as if the Father was dis- gusted with his Son on the cross. As usual, Turretin explains the matter—in this case the “punishment of desertion” (Matt. 27:46)—with careful precision. The desertion on the cross was not “absolute, total, and eternal (such as is felt only by demons and the reprobate), but temporal and relative.” Likewise, the desertion Christ experienced was not with respect to “the union of nature,” nor “the union of grace and holiness.” Neither was Christ deprived of the Father’s “communion and protection.” Instead, God suspended “for a little while the favorable presence of grace and the influx of consolation and happiness.” In other words, the Son’s “sense of the divine love” was “intercepted by the sense of divine wrath and vengeance resting upon him” (Elenctic Theology 13.14.5). Whether McCall would approve of that last line or not, clearly Turretin meant to affirm

90 Christ’s forsakenness in a way that avoids any notion of Trinita- rian rupture. McCall also dings R. C. Sproul for his explanation of Christ’s accursedness, but it seems to me Sproul was trying to make the same point as Turretin when Sproul observes, “On the cross, Jesus entered into the experience of forsakenness on our behalf. God turned his back on Jesus and cut him off from all blessing, from all keeping, from all grace, and from all peace.” This sounds more like withholding “the favorable presence of grace” than a Trini- ty-busting Father-Son brouhaha.

SCREAM OF THE DAMNED McCall is also concerned that some popular notions of the cross turn Christ into the damned of God. To be sure, we must be careful with our language. The Son of God experienced the horrors of damnation, but he was not himself damned. It would be better to say that Christ’s sufferings were hellish or that he bore the weight of eternal punishment than to say that Christ entered the place of the damned. Again, Turretin is helpful:

As he is properly said to be damned who in hell endures the punishment due to his own sins, this term cannot be applied to Christ, who never suffered for his own but for our sins; nor did he suffer in hell, but on earth. Still there is no objection to saying that the Son of God was condemned for us by God, just as elsewhere he is said to have been made a curse and malediction for us. (Elenctic Theology, 13.16.10)

Does this mean Sproul was wrong to speak of “the scream of the damned”? Granted, the phrase is provocative and easily misunderstood. It’s not a phrase I would use, but we should remember—and here I’m using McCall’s own quotation—that

91 Sproul said it was “as if a voice from heaven said, ‘Damn you, Jesus’” (emphasis mine). Sproul’s use of the phrase was homiletical/metaphorical more than technical/analytical, although I see McCall’s point (and Turretin’s).

HOW DOES THIS WORK? The CT article makes clear what McCall does not believe about the cross:

There is no biblical evidence that the Father-Son communion was somehow ruptured on that day. Nowhere is it written that the Father was angry with the Son. Nowhere can we read that God “curses him to the pit of hell.” Nowhere it is written that Jesus absorbs the wrath of God by taking the exact punishment that we deserve. In no passage is there any indication that God’s wrath is “infinitely intense” as it is poured out on Jesus.

If this is what did not happen on the cross, then what did take place? McCall believes in sin and guilt. He also affirms the wrath of God, but how he thinks this wrath is turned away was unclear to me. He says, “The Son enters our brokenness and takes upon himself the ‘curse’ caused by humanity’s sin.” McCall ac- knowledges that the Old Testament bears witness to “both the wrath of God and the sacrifices offered for sin” and that the New Testament “draws these connections” and presents Jesus as our sacrifice and substitute. Elsewhere he says, “Christ came to get us out of hell” and that “Christ’s sacrificial work saves us from the wrath of God.” So how does this happen if Jesus did not absorb the wrath of God? It’s good to point out the New Testament “connections” between wrath and sacrifice, but what specifically is the connection? How does Christ’s sacrificial work actually save us from the wrath of God?

92 Most evangelical Christians would affirm that “Christ sustai- ned in body and soul the anger of God” (Heidelberg Catechism, Q/A 37). As the curse for us (Gal. 3:13), Christ reconciled us to God, making a way for a just God to justify ungodly sinners (Rom. 3:21–26). Just like the bloody atonement of old, Christ’s death was a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God to atone for our sins (Lev. 1:9, 13, 17; Eph. 5:2). In fact, the very notion of propitiation implies that God’s righteous anger had to be assuaged (Rom. 3:25; Heb. 2:17; 1 John 2:2; 4:10). Christ did not feel forsaken by God for no reason. To be sure, the Trinity was not broken on Good Friday, but it was still “the will of the Lord to crush” the suffering servant (Isa. 53:10). If on the cross as Jesus died, the wrath of God was not satisfied, how was it then appeased?

BETTER WAY In support of his overall argument, McCall enlists two Reformed heavyweights. He quotes John Calvin to the effect that the Father could not be angry with his beloved Son, and then quotes Charles Hodge denying that Christ’s death was a quid pro quo arrangement where the Son suffered exactly what sinners deserved. Both quotations are accurate and important, but given their original context I wonder if they help McCall’s case or point us in a different direction. Calvin’s statement is part of a larger discussion about the cry of dereliction in Matthew 27:46. Calvin rejects the ideas that Jesus was merely expressing the opinion of others or using Psalm 22 to give voice to Israel’s lament. No: “his words were drawn forth from anguish deep within his heart.” Christ felt himself forsaken and estranged from God. And then comes the line McCall quotes: “Yet we do not suggest that God was ever inimical or angry toward him. How could he be angry toward his beloved Son, ‘in whom his heart reposed’?”

93 But notice Calvin’s next sentence: “How could Christ by his intercession appease the Father toward others, if he were himself hateful to God?” Clearly, Calvin does not see the idea of wrath-satisfaction as being at odds with unbroken Father-Son communion. “This is what we are saying,” Calvin continues, “he bore the weight of divine severity, since he was ‘stricken and afflicted’ by God’s hand, and experienced all the signs of a wrathful and avenging God” (Inst. 2.16.11). We should never say that on the cross, the Father hated the Son. And yet, we can say—and must say if we are to make sense of the cry of dereliction in Matthew 27 and the curse language of Galatians 3—that Christ, bearing the imputed sin and guilt of his people, bore the wrath of God in our place. As Calvin says later, “If the effect of his shedding blood is that our sins are not imputed to us, it follows that God’s judgment was satisfied by that price” (Inst. 2.17.4). We see something similar when we examine Hodge’s larger argument. In discussing the atonement, Hodge highlights two kinds of satisfaction. The one is “pecuniary or commercial,” as when a debtor pays the demands of his creditor in full. This is the quid pro quo (this for that) arrangement Hodge rejects. Christ does not satisfy our debt in a commercial sense, because in a commercial transaction all that matters is that the debt is paid. It doesn’t matter who pays it or how it gets paid, so long as the debt is covered. The claim of the creditor is upon the debt, not upon the person. The other kind of satisfaction, and the kind Hodge approves, is “penal or forensic,” wherein Christ makes satisfaction not for a generic debt but for the sinner himself. Christ’s “death satisfied divine justice” because it “was a real adequate compensation for the penalty remitted and the benefits conferred.” True, as McCa- ll points out, Hodge maintains that Christ “did not suffer either in kind or degree what sinners would have suffered.” But this should not be construed as an argument against penal substi-

94 tution. For in the next sentence Hodge affirms, “In value, his sufferings infinitely transcended theirs. . . . So the humiliation, sufferings, and death of the eternal Son of God immeasurably transcended in worth and power the penalty which a world of sinners would have endured” (Systematic Theology, 2:470-71). Hodge would agree with McCall’s point that Christ did not suffer exactly what sinners deserve, but would McCall agree with Ho- dge that Christ suffered the weight of what sinners deserved? More to the point, would he agree with Hodge’s understanding of forensic satisfaction? “The essence of the penalty of the divine law,” Hodge writes, “is the manifestation of God’s displeasure, the withdrawal of the divine favor. This Christ suffered in our stead. He bore the wrath of God.” For sinners this would lead to “hopeless perdition,” but for Christ it meant “a transient hiding of the Father’s face” (473). And lest this be confused with a breach of Trinitarian relations, Ho- dges makes clear that the “satisfaction of Christ” was a “matter of covenant between the Father and the Son” (472). Granted, McCall is from the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition, so he may deny all that Calvin and Hodge affirm. But at the very least, they show us a way to deny what McCall wants to deny—a crass Father versus Son Trinitarian breach—while still affirming a wrath-satisfying, God-appeasing, Father-turns-his-face-away penal substitutionary atonement.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kevin DeYoung is the senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church, in Matthews, North Carolina.. You can find him on Twitter at @ RevKevDeYoung.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on Kevin’s blog on The Gospel Coalition.

95 Nothing To Be Ashamed Of

PENAL SUBSTITUTIONARY ATONEMENT IN HONOR-SHAME CULTURES

Aubrey Sequeira

Anand Samuel

e, the authors, were born, raised, born again, and currently live and serve in what may be appropriately Wlabeled as honor-shame cultures. The prevailing view among many theologians and missiologists concerning our cultural context is that presenting Christ’s atonement in terms of penal substitution is ineffective at best, and is a distortion of the gospel at worst.9 The categories of law, guilt, punishment, and retributive 9 This charge against penal substitution is leveled, for instance, by Joel B. Green and Mark D. Baker, Recovering the

96 justice that are intrinsic to penal substitutionary atonement alle- gedly stem from Western, individualistic cultures and are conse- quently foreign to Eastern, collectivistic cultures that are steeped in categories of honor and shame. Therefore, it is claimed that what Christ accomplished on the cross must be reframed in the cultural categories of shame, honor, and social credit in order to effectively present the gospel in such cultures.

As pastors in an honor-shame context, we respectfully disagree with such approaches. In fact, we maintain that penal substitution offers a helpful corrective to those living in an honor-shame culture, and helps them rightly understand their status before God and what God has done for sinners in Jesus Christ.

WHAT IS AN HONOR-SHAME CULTURE AND HOW DO PROPONENTS OF HONOR-SHAME CATEGORIES REFRAME THE ATONEMENT? Honor-shame cultures are collectivistic cultures that prize societal approval and relational harmony. Violating community expectations draws “shame” and disgrace, while conforming to social mores advances one’s reputation or “honor” in the community. Many have attempted to contextualize the gospel message and reframe the meaning of the cross to better fit this framework. Some such attempts have been balanced and cautious, while others have been seriously problematic.10 Scandal of the Cross: Atonement in New Testament and Contemporary Contexts (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000); Jayson Georges, “Jesus’ Death for Muslims,” [online]. Available from: http://honorshame.com/jesus- death-for-muslims/; Juliet November, Honor/Shame Cultures: A Beginner’s Guide to Cross-Cultural Missions (Independently Published: 2017), 143–48. 10 An example of an egregiously problematic and disturbing treatment of atonement in honor-shame categories is Green and Baker, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross, 192–209. Interestingly, many proponents of honor-shame categories for atonement today cite and appeal to Green and Baker’s work, which has exercised massive influence. Green and Baker’s project as a whole aims to show that the death of Christ can be interpreted in a variety of ways, a kaleidoscope of images with no one image occupying the center. Green and Baker mishandle the biblical data and ultimately rip the atoning work of Jesus out of its biblical and theological context, and re-invent it with meaning foreign to Scripture. For a compelling and devastating response to Green and Baker, see Stephen J. Wellum, “Preaching Christ Crucified Today: Recovering the True Scandal of the Cross” in Ministry of Grace:

97 In general, the atonement is reframed as follows: (1) Throu- gh their sin, people have broken their relationship with God; (2) their sin thus results in shame and disgrace; (3) through his death, Jesus takes on our shame and restores our honor; (4) we must respond by being loyal to Jesus and entering God’s family; (5) thus, though we were once shamed and outcast, God through Christ raises us into eternal honor.11 Typically muted in such models are notions of guilt incurred through violating God’s law, God’s wrath expressed in retributive justice for law-breaking, and God’s pro- vision of our Lord Jesus Christ as a righteous, wrath-absorbing substitute through whom we receive forgiveness of sins and a righteous standing before him. Are these re-interpretations of the atonement faithful to the Scriptures? We contend that they are not. In fact, we believe that these reconstructions empty the cross of its power (1 Cor. 1:17). We present our argument on three fronts, followed by some reflections on how we think the atonement should be presented in cultures like ours.

THREE REASONS TO AVOID THE HONOR-SHAME RE- INTERPRETATION OF THE ATONEMENT

(1) Biblical Categories Must Take Priority over Cultural Ones First, in all articulations of the atonement, indeed in all theology, biblical categories must take precedence over cultural ones. We must read the Bible on its own terms and in its own categories and framework.12 We are not free to impose extrabibli- cal worldviews on Scripture in order to reshape its message in

Essays in Honor of John G. Reisinger, ed. Steve West (Frederick, MD: New Covenant Media, 2007): 107–144. For an example of a somewhat careful and more balanced approach to using honor-shame categories, although not without problems, see Jackson Wu, Saving God’s Face: A Chinese Contextualization of Salvation through Honor and Shame (Pasadena, CA: William Carey International University Press, 2012). 11 See November, Honor/Shame Cultures, 146. 12 We are indebted to Stephen Wellum for this crucial hermeneutical principle.

98 ways that better fits our context. The cross does not come to us as a raw and uninterpreted event, giving us the license to infu- se it with new meaning in encounters with new cultural contexts. Rather, the inner-biblical and apostolic interpretation of the atonement is penal and substitutionary. Penal substitution is, in John Stott’s words, “the heart of the atonement itself.”13 It is the “center of the atonement,” the “linchpin” without which one cannot make sense of the other images that the NT authors use to describe the atonement: redemption, sacrifice, victory, reconciliation, justification, etc.14 Furthermore, the categories that form the basis for penal substitutionary atonement do not arise from an “Enlightenment worldview” or from the interpretive biases of a Western judicial framework.15 Rather, the categories of law, guilt, retributive justice, and righteousness are inscripturated, biblical categories that are woven into the warp and woof of the biblical storyline and developed across the covenants of redemptive-history in the biblical canon. In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve rebel against God’s Lordship by violating his command, rendering them guilty before the divine Judge. Adam’s trespass results in condemnation for all his posterity (Rom 5:12–21). Throughout the OT, we see the judicial categories of guilt and righteousness developed through the Mosaic covenant and Law, the Levitical sacrificial system, and finally through the promise of a righteous Servant who would offer himself to bear the guilt of his people and declare them righteous (Isa 53:11). This framework forms the backdrop to the NT interpretation of Christ’s atonement as a work of penal substitution.

13 John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1986), 203. 14 Roger R. Nicole, “Postscript on Penal Substitution,” in The Glory of the Atonement: Biblical, Historical, and Practical Perspectives: Essays in Honor of Roger Nicole, ed. Charles E. Hill and Frank A. James (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 45–47. For a persuasive presentation of penal substitution as central to the cross-work of Christ, see also Stephen J. Wellum, Christ Alone: The Uniqueness of Jesus as Savior (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017), 157–248. 15 As claimed, for instance, Jayson Georges, “Jesus’ Death for Muslims.”

99 (2) Honor and Shame in the Bible But wait! Wasn’t the Bible written in an honor-shame culture? And isn’t Scripture replete with honor and shame? Yes, indeed. And the categories of “honor” and “shame” can be fruitful when rightly understood and rightly applied from within their biblical framework. Scripture’s framework of honor and shame, however, is not simply equivalent to any given culture’s understanding. In most cultures, “honor” and ”shame” are linked to the ob- servation of community ideals and one’s social standing in the community. Cultures treat them as community-centered—they’re largely “horizontal” in nature, referring to one’s relational standing in the community. We must remember that culture is the construct of fallen human beings. Every culture has been affected by the Fall and expresses our sin and rebellion against God. Our disobedience to God has broken our relationship with our Maker and has brought death into the world. In our fallen nature, we seek to assert our autonomy from God’s Lordship. We think and do according to what’s right in our own eyes. We are born into this world as sinners by nature and co-habitate with other sinners to form habits, customs, and traditions that are a result of what we think is right. In short, fallen human cultures define “honor” and “shame” as they see fit, while the writers of the Old and New Testaments would call such definitions shameful (Ps. 119:80, 2 Thess. 3:14).16 For example, Scripture’s categories of honor and shame are thoroughly God-centered and primarily “vertical,” referring to one’s standing before God. Biblically, “honor” is tied to God’s glory: God is worthy of honor and obedience from human beings because he is Creator and Lord. Sin is the failure to honor God’s lordship by distrusting him and disobeying his commands (Mal. 1:6, Rom. 1:18–21).

16 For instance, there is nothing honorable about an “honor-killing.” Such societal definitions of honor and shame are unbiblical and profoundly evil.

100 Shame is the human experience of dishonor and alienation from God (and one another) that results from sin, specifically, because we stand objectively guilty, under the sentence of condemnation due to dishonoring of God and violating his commands. Those who live in sin and rebellion will face eschatological shame—they will stand condemned in the final judgment and experience God’s eschatological wrath. While a culturally defined notion of “shame” can be experientially confusing and misplaced, the biblical notion of shame results from objective guilt. The shame of Genesis 3:10 follows the disobedience and condemnation that results from Genesis 3:6.17 In the gospel, Jesus, God the Son incarnate, bears the guilt and shame of all those who have dishonored God and are deserving of eternal punishment and shame. He stood in the place of his people as a substitute to reconcile sinners to God; to credit the honor of his righteous life as a gift of grace through faith to those who recognize that they stand ashamed before a holy Trinitarian community. Jesus bore the penalty of our guilt by suffering under God’s righteous wrath. The only one who perfectly honored his Father and is worthy of infinite honor was stripped naked, beaten, mocked and put to open “shame” in his earthly community. But he despised that “shame” and endured the cross looking forward to the highest ho- nor that would be bestowed upon him (Heb. 12:2). While the world thought Jesus was being put to “shame,” he was in fact putting the world to shame (Col. 2:15, 1 Cor. 1:18–20). The good news of the gospel is that all who turn from their sins and put their trust in Jesus will be saved: “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame” (Rom. 10:11). Those who trust in him therefore stand justified before God in the present, share the hope of eschatological glory and honor in God’s heavenly kingdom, and are rescued from eschatological shame and punishment 17 Pastorally speaking, guilt and shame are rightly stitched together, for instance, when a victim of sexual violence, who feels great shame, is shepherded towards understanding that they did nothing wrong and hence have nothing to be ashamed of.

101 (Rom. 5:1–11). We see here that “honor” and “shame” as biblical categories are inextricably tied to the judicial categories of guilt and righteousness. The answer to “honor” and “shame” cultures is not to jettison the biblical model of penal substitution in favor of something novel, but to define shame and honor as the Bible defines them and then to present the atoning work of Jesus in its complete biblical framework.

(3) Cultures are not that simple! And finally, those who advocate re-interpreting the atonement for “honor-shame” cultures frequently argue that penal substitution is a product of a “Western” guilt and innocence framework and thus will not work in “Eastern” honor and shame cultures. Such a bifurcation of cultures is reductionistic and simplistic. For instance, Islamic cultures are often touted as being group-oriented and steeped in honor and shame and thus devoid of categories of guilt, retributive justice, and absolute standards.18 These evaluations of Islamic culture, however, overlook the Sharia law, the religious judicial framework that governs Islamic society and is manifestly a system of guilt and righteousness. Similarly, the claim that notions of honor and shame are alien to ”Western” cultures is also overstated. Even a cursory study of social mores in English Victorian society or the ante- bellum US South reveals a different picture. For a more contemporary example of the West’s honor and shame dynamic, consider the phenomenon of Internet shaming and social media. Consider also the complex sub-cultures within larger communities. To be a high school student in America today is to live within an “honor-shame” culture. One must also take into account that culture is always chan- ging with time and for different reasons. What one might assu-

18 Georges, “Jesus’ Death for Muslims.”

102 me to be a distinctly Asian custom may have been a distinctly Western habit in a bygone era. It’s true that the categories of guilt and righteousness have always been more dominant in Western society, but perhaps these are the result of the Bible’s long influence in these cultures!

HOW DO WE SHARE THE GOSPEL IN AN HONOR SHAME CULTURE? In our context—or for that matter, in any context—evangelism involves helping people see their objective standing of guilt and condemnation before God for their failure to honor him and for their transgression of his law. We appeal to the innate knowledge of all human beings that they have failed to glorify their Creator, that they have broken his commands, and that they are therefore subject to his righteous wrath and the sentence of eternal punishment (Rom 1:18–32). We use words like “shame” and “honor” the same way the Bible does. We then point to God’s love and grace in sending his own Son to redeem sinners. Jesus Christ acts as our representative and substitute, bearing our guilt and absorbing God’s wrath on the cross. All those who repent and trust in Christ and his finished work are declared righteous in God’s sight and are free from eschatological punishment and shame. We then appeal to our friends to disregard the “shame” and “disgrace” that they will face in their community for confessing Christ, and remind them that if anyone suffers as a Christian, they are not to be ashamed but to glorify God in that name (1 Pet. 4:16). We also encourage them that as members together in a new, blood-washed community, we will bear their sorrows and mistreatment with them (Heb. 13:3, 1 Cor. 12:26, Rom. 12:15). And as we do so, we will exhort one another that it is more important to honor God than to receive honor from men.

103 HOLDING FAST TO SCRIPTURE’S INTERPRETATION OF THE CROSS The cross simply does not lend itself to a multiplicity of interpretations, nor are we free as interpreters to create an “Indian theology of the cross,” a “Muslim theology of Jesus’ death,” or a “Japa- nese understanding of atonement.” As heralds of Christ crucified, our task is first to work from the biblical data to understand the inscripturated meaning of Jesus’ death and then to confront the categories of any given culture with the structures and categories of the Bible. We must re-orient our hearers’ worldview and categories to Scripture. We must not adjust the message of the cross to conform to a cultural framework. To do so is to pervert and distort the gospel of Christ. Reconstructing the gospel into cultural categories in the name of “contextualization” is an affront to the design of divine offensi- veness. The message of penal substitutionary atonement is super- naturally designed to be scandalous to some cultures and foolishness to others covering the entire spectrum of fallen humanity (1 Cor. 1:23). The gospel turns every cultural category on its head and in the process creates new ones, thus creating a new culture among the citizens of a heavenly country.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Aubrey Sequeira grew up in South India. He serves as associate pastor at the Evangelical Community Church of Abu Dhabi and teaches theology at the Gulf Training Center, Dubai. You can follow him on Twitter at @AubreySequeira.

Anand Samuel grew up in Saudi Arabia and India. He is the senior pastor of Grace Evangelical Church of Sharjah. He completed an MA in Biblical and Theological Studies from Knox Theological Seminary.

104 Did the Church Fathers Affirm Penal Substitutionary Atonement?

Brian Arnold

he substitutionary death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the centerpiece of the Bible and of Christian theology. TSubstitutionary atonement was foreshadowed in the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, accomplished in the New Testa- ment, and has been preached, believed, and treasured throughout history. Since the Reformation, Protestants have heavily accented the penal nature of substitutionary atonement. Penal substitution, a judicial term, means that Jesus paid the penalty for sin in a legal sense, purchasing our redemption at the cost of his blood. We are saved because Jesus took our place and paid our penalty. The Reformers highlighted this doctrine because of the way it fit with their view of forensic justification, especially in their re- futation of Catholic view of righteousness and justification. This

105 background has led some to wonder whether the Reformers invented the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement, or if we can find traces of it in the wake of the apostles’ death. Did the church fathers also hold to the doctrine of penal substitution? The answer is yes and no. Yes, the church fathers spoke often of Christ’s substitutionary death on the cross, occasionally in penal language, but no, they did not place it centrally the way the Refor- mers did. For the church fathers, Jesus died primarily as our substitute to triumph over death and the devil. To suggest that penal substitutionary atonement (PSA) was the dominant model for the fathers, or even a prevalent one, is too strong. However, it’s just as problematic to deny its presence altogether in the early church. Perhaps the most beautiful feature of the father’s description of the nature of the atonement is how multidimensional it is. In the cross Jesus died to take back what the Devil had claimed (Christus Victor), he died to bring about our healing (Christus Medicus), he reconstituted humanity as a new and better Adam (Recapitula- tion), he satisfied the payment for sin (Satisfaction Theory), and he died on behalf of sinners to pay their penalty for sin (PSA). The presence of penal substitution in the fathers is hotly contested, but when we examine the evidence, it seems clear that PSA was at least one aspect of the atonement that certain fathers claimed. We’ll look at just two works in the early church to show this— the Epistle to Diognetus and On the Incarnation, though we could add Justin Martyr, Eusebius of Caesarea, Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and many more.19 Again, when we allow that the fathers explained the purpose of the atonement in multiple ways, we see that penal substitution was one of them, even if not the central motif. TheEpistle to Diognetus, a second-century apology (c. AD 150), is often described as the gem of early Christian epistles. In it, an

19 See especially Steve Jeffery, Michael Ovey, and Andrew Sach, Pierced for our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007), 161–83.

106 unidentified author wrote to the unknown recipient, Diognetus, asking him a series of questions including why Christianity has come into the world now and not before (Diogn. 1). The answer he gives is that sin had to have time to swell up so that Jesus could come and atone for it. Humanity needed to know the weight of sin, to experience God’s patience, and to recognize our inability to enter God’s kingdom on our own, an idea he seems to get from Paul (Diogn. 9.1; cf. Rom 3:25–26; 5:6; Gal 4:4). Then, in one of the most profound statements about the atonement from the early church, the author wrote this:

For what else was able to cover our sins except the righteousness of that one? In whom was it possible for us, the lawless and ungodly to be justified except in the Son of God alone? O the sweet exchange, O the inscrutable work (of God), O the unexpected benefits (of God), that the lawlessness of many might be hidden in one righteous man, while the righteousness of one might justify many lawless men (Diogn. 9.3–5).

O sweet exchange! These words express PSA from theology to doxology. Jesus is our exchange—he is the sinless one who died for the sinful ones. His righteousness and godliness were needed in the stead of the unrighteous and ungodly. Just several lines before these, we read that the “wages—punishment and death— were to be expected” because of sin. God demanded punishment on account of sin, but in his mercy and patience, he substituted Christ to pay those wages, the “holy one for the lawless, the guiltless of the guilty, the just for the unjust, the incorruptible for the corruptible, the immortal for the mortal” (Diogn. 9.2). Tied together, then, are the concepts of PSA and justification, both with legal categories. God justifies the ungodly by the penal substitutionary death of his Son. But the author also resounds with gratitude and worship in these words. The death of Jesus Christ to pay the penalty for sin

107 is sweet! Penal substitution is the great exchange, it is the inscrutable work of God, and it should cause anyone who thinks about it to worship. Roughly one hundred and fifty years later, Athanasius of Alexandria (AD 296–373) expressed his thoughts on the atonement. Athanasius is best remembered for his steadfast conviction to orthodox Christology at the Council of Nicaea. He stood contra mundum, against the world, as he fought for Jesus’ full divinity against Arianism. His enduring assault in response to Arianism is found in his book On the Incarnation, in which he explains why God had to become man. For Athanasius, the atonement and incarnation are necessarily interwoven. Jesus became man precisely because we needed someone who could conquer death in our stead. In explaining this, he repeatedly connects Christ’s death in our place to the penalty we owe. He wrote, “And thus taking from our bodies one of like nature, because all were under penalty of the corruption of death gave it over to death in the stead of all, and offered it to the Father” (On the Incarnation 8). Sin brings with it a penalty of death and Jesus was given over to death in our place. In a section on the purpose of the incarnation, Athanasius set his sights on the cross:

But since it was necessary also that the debt owing from all should be paid again, for…it was owing that all should die…he next offered up his sacrifice also on behalf of all, yielding his temple to death in the stead of all, in order firstly to make men quit and free of their old trespass, and further to show himself more powerful even than death, displaying his own body incorruptible as first fruits of the resurrection of all (On the Incarnation 20).

Here we get a glimpse of both penal substitution and Christus Victor. Jesus died to pay our debt both to make us free of sin and to show that he has conquered death. Although Athanasius typi-

108 cally speaks of the cross in what we call Christus Victor, there are numerous places that his language could be interpreted to be in line with penal substitution. Thorough studies of the atonement in the church fathers are needed. Many evangelicals are retrieving the fathers today, and this is for the enrichment of our heritage, and what better place to focus our attention than on how the first followers of Christ understood the atonement? Mostly, I hope we can recover their multifaceted view of the cross. So long as PSA remains the fundamental purpose of the cross, as it is in Scripture, the other aspects of the atonement, from Christus Victor to Christus Me- dicus, can fill out our meditation on the cross and help us to appreciate all the things Jesus Christ achieved in his death.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Brian Arnold (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is the president of Phoenix Seminary.

109 How Does Penal Substitution Relate to Other Atonement Theories?

Steve J. Wellum

rying to capture all that our Lord Jesus Christ achieved in his glorious work is not easy given its multi-faceted aspects. TJohn Calvin sought to summarize the comprehensive nature of Christ’s work by the munus triplex—Christ’s threefold office as our new covenant head and mediator—prophet, priest, and king. What Calvin sought to avoid was reductionism, the “car- dinal” sin of theology. Although it’s dangerous to prioritize one aspect of our Lord’s work, Scripture does stress the centrality of Christ’s priestly office and his sacrificial death for our sins (Matt 1:21; 1 Cor 15:3–4). And given the centrality of Christ’s cross, it’s crucial that we explain it correctly. A variety of atonement theologies have emerged throughout church history. In fact, unlike the ecumenical confessions of Ni-

110 caea and Chalcedon that established orthodox Trinitarian and Christological doctrine, no catholic confession exists regarding the cross. From this fact, some have concluded that no one view of the cross should be privileged—a conclusion I reject. Despite the lack of an ecumenical confession, all Christians have agreed that Christ’s death secures forgiveness of sins resulting in our reconciliation with God. Yet, admittedly, as with other doctrines, the church’s understanding of the atonement clarified over time. Specifically, during the Reformation and post-Reformation eras pastors and theologians began to recognize that penal substitution was the best theological explanation for why the cross happened and what it achieved. Recently, however, some have challenged that claim. We are told repeatedly that penal substitution is reductionistic, that it doesn’t account for the richness of the cross. We’re told that what’s needed is not one view but multiple views. But is this correct? My thesis is that it is not, and for at least two reasons. First, views other than penal substitution fail to grasp the central problem that the cross remedies, namely our sin before God. Second, from another angle, other views stress various legitimate entailments of the cross but without penal substitution as their foundation, these entailments alone cannot explain the central problem of our sin before God. Before developing these complementary points, I will first describe various atonement theories over against penal substitution.

VARIOUS ATONEMENT THEOLOGIES IN HISTORICAL THEOLOGY First, recapitulation was one way of explaining the cross, a view often associated with Irenaeus and even Athanasius. Christ’s redemptive work was interpreted primarily in terms of his identification with humanity through the incarnation.

111 By becoming human, God the Son reversed what Adam did by living our life and dying our death. Adam’s disobedience resulted in the corruption of our nature and the deprivation of God- likeness. Christ reverses both of these results in his incarnation and cross-work. Especially in Christ’s resurrection, immortality is restored to us as well as reconciliation with God. This view emphasizes several biblical truths. Christ’s work is presented in representational and substitutionary terms. But its central focus is on sin’s effects on us and Christ’s restorative work, not on our sin before God and the need for Christ to satisfy God’s own righteous demand against us by paying for our sin. Second, Christus Victor, a view often associated with the ransom theory to Satan, views the primary objects of Christ’s death as the powers—sin, death, and Satan. By his work on the cross, Christ liberates us from these powers. In the Patristic era, the Fathers focused on Christ redeeming us from Satan, while modern adherents focus more on liberation from the powers of sin and death. Like recapitulation, Christus Victor captures a lot of biblical data, especially Christ’s defeat of the powers (Gen 3:15; John 12:31–33; Col 2:13–15; Heb 2:14–16; Rev 12:1–12), but unlike penal substitution, God is not viewed as the primary object of the cross. Third, the example or moral influence view has been promoted within non-orthodox, liberal theology. It had its roots in the theology of Peter Abelard (AD 1079–1142), but became prominent with the rise of liberal theology (18th–19th centuries). It taught that God’s love is more fundamental than his justice and that God can forgive our sins apart from Christ satisfying divine justice. God, then, is not the primary object of the cross. Instead, Christ’s death reveals God’s love and sets an example for us. Fourth, the governmental view arose in the post-Reformation era and is often identified with Hugo Grotius, John Miley, and the

112 Arminian tradition. Contra penal substitution, this view denies that God’s justice necessitates the full payment of our sin since God’s justice is not viewed as essential to him. Instead, God, as the moral Governor, can choose to relax the demand of the law (since it is external to him) similar to a human judge, thus forgiving us by his mercy. And yet, God cannot overlook sin; he governs the world justly and reveals the serious nature of sin. So Christ’s cross upholds the moral governance of the universe allowing God to forgive us without a full payment of our sin, and it reveals God’s hatred of sin thus motivating us to repent and believe in Christ. Finally, penal substitution had precursors in the early church and even in Anselm. It came to fullness in the Reformation and post-Reformation eras. Penal substitution does not deny the multi-faceted aspects of Christ’s death such as the restoration of what Adam lost, the defeat of the powers, the revelation of God’s love, and so on. Instead, it contends that central to the cross is God the Son incarnate acting as our new covenant representative and substitute to satisfy fully the triune God’s righteous demand against us due to our sin. Apart from this central achievement of the cross, there is no restoration of humanity, there is no defeat of the powers, and there is no love revealed. Why? Because at the heart of penal substitution is a specific understanding of the God-law-sin relationship—or better, a specific theology proper. Penal substitution takes seriously the fact that the triune God is alone independent and self-sufficient. Specifically, in relation to the moral law, this entails that God does not adjudicate a law external to him; instead, he is the law. This is why, in relation to sin, God cannot tolerate sin (Hab 1:12–13; Isa 1:4–20; 35:8); he must act in holy justice against it (Gen 18:25) because he cannot deny himself. And yet, how does God demonstrate his holy justice and covenant love, given his free decision to redeem us (Gen 3:15;

113 Hos 11:9)? In this regard, the Bible’s storyline reveals a tension that’s rooted in who God is vis-à-vis sin. This tension is central to the why of the cross. Since God is the Law, he cannot forgive us without the full satisfaction of his holy and righteous demand (Rom 3:21–26; Heb 9:15–22). To justify the ungodly (Rom 4:5), the triune God must take the initiative to provide a Redeemer who can pay for our sin and act in perfect obedience for us. Christ must not only be our victor and substitute, he must also be our penal substitute. Ultimately, satisfying God’s justice is central to the cross, and other views of the atonement fail to stress this vital point.

EVALUATING ATONEMENT THEOLOGIES IN RELATION TO PENAL SUBSTITUTION Let us now return to my thesis. Various atonement theologies emphasize many biblical truths and entailments of the cross. But unlike penal substitution, they fail to grasp the central problem that the cross remedies, namely our sin before God. Every atonement view stresses something biblical about the cross. Recapitulation rightly grasps the Adam–Christ relationship across redemptive history (Rom 5:12–21). In the first Adam, God demanded covenantal obedience, yet Adam disobeyed and brought sin and death into the world. What is needed is the incarnation of God’s Son, the last Adam, to live and die for us, and thus restore us to the purpose of our creation (Heb 2:5–18). But too often, this view doesn’t emphasize enough that our triune God requires perfect covenantal obedience from us, and the need for Christ to be our representative in life and penal substitute in death. It rightly stresses many biblical truths but fails to grasp adequately the God-law-sin relationship. Similarly, Christus Victor also emphasizes many glorious truths. It underscores the need for the Son to become human to

114 crush Satan’s head (Gen 3:15) and defeat sin and death. And yet, it doesn’t make central the God-law-sin relationship. In Scrip- ture, sin, death, and Satan are only powers over us because of our sin before God (Gen 2:17; Rom 6:23; Heb 2:14–15). How are the powers defeated? Furthermore, why did the divine Son have to die to defeat them? Why did the Son not merely exert his divine power? Because it is only when our sin is paid for that the powers are destroyed (Col 2:13–15; 1 Cor 15:55–57). Our greatest problem is not the powers but standing justified before God. Christus Victor without penal substitution hangs in mid-air. Scripture also presents Christ and his cross as the supreme moral example of love, obedience, and suffering (John 13:12–17; Eph 5:1–2, 25–27; Phil 2:5–11; 1 Pet 2:18–25). But the cross only functions this way because of who dies and what he achieves, namely the full satisfaction of God’s holy demand against our sin, which is the very demonstration of divine love (1 John 4:7–10). Also, it’s never enough for Christ merely to identify with us in his incarnation and show us how to live. Solidarity is not atonement, only its prerequisite. We need more than a mere example to redeem us. What we need is for the divine Son to live and die for us. Our problem is not merely that we need a great teacher to show us how to live. Our problem is sin before the triune holy God, and this problem requires the enfleshment of God’s own Son to live for us and to die for us as our penal substitute. It’s only as our propitiatory sacrifice that God’s own righteous demand is fully met, and we, in Christ, receive all the glorious benefits and entailments of his new covenant work. Of all the atonement theologies, only penal substitution best captures the God-centered nature of the cross. The alternatives either minimize or deny that God’s holy justice is essential to him, why our sin is first against God (Ps 51:4), and why Christ as our penal substitute is central to the cross. Before we can speak of the horizontal entailments of the cross, we must first speak of

115 the vertical—namely the triune God, in his Son, taking his own demand on himself so that we, in Christ, may be justified before him (Rom 5:1–2). Other atonement views either miss or undermine this point. For them, the object of the cross is either our sin (forms of recapitulation), or Satan (ransom theory), or the powers (forms of Christus Victor). But what they fail to see is that the primary person we have sinned against is our great and glorious triune Creator and Lord, and as such, the ultimate object of the cross is God himself. The Bible’s presentation of the cross is rich and multifaceted— like a beautiful gem that can be looked at from many angles. And yet, the very center of Christ’s cross-work is that he has come as our mediator and new covenant head to offer himself before God on behalf of sin. Penal substitution best accounts for why the divine Son had to die, and why he alone saves. With Paul, may we alone glory in and preach Christ crucified (1 Cor 1:23).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Stephen J. Wellum is a Professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky and editor of the Southern Baptist Journal of Theology.

116 Lose Particular Redemption, Lose Penal Substitution

Sinclair Ferguson

he (assigned!) topic raises a question. Particular redemption receives enough hostile press already. So, is 9Marks Toverly scholastic in suggesting that the “What?” of the atonement (penal substitution) and the “For whom?” (particular redemption) are inextricably linked? The 19th century Scottish theologian John McLeod Campbell believed so, and therefore in The Nature of the Atonement(1 st edi- tion, 1856) sought to deconstruct and demolish the doctrine of penal substitution. He argued: “That cannot be the true conception of the nature of the atonement which implies that Christ died for an election from among men” (emphasis added). Our interest here is not to rehearse every argument for particular redemption, but only this question: Assuming penal substitution lies at the heart of the atonement, what bearing does that have on its extent?

117 One passage will absorb our attention: 2 Corinthians 5:11–21. It is particularly significant because it employs universal language in relation to Christ’s death (“all” vv. 14, 15, and “world” v.19). Echoing Aquinas, this universal language seems to presuppose an unlimited atonement. But Paul’s reasoning leads to a different conclusion, teaching us, incidentally, that true exposition must lay bare not only the words but the inner logic of the text. Two dimensions of Paul’s reasoning are significant here:

I: THE LOGIC OF THE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF RECONCILIATION • One died for all (v.14). Here the word translated “for” (huper) carries the sense “instead of, in place of”—i.e. substitution. For these “all” Christ died (v.15) the death which is “the wages [= penalty] of sin” (Rom. 6:23). • In this way, God was “not counting their (the “all”) trespasses against them” (v.19). • Instead, he counted their (= the “all”) trespasses against Christ, and also counted his righteousness to them (v.21). • Thus, God was “reconciling the world (the “all”) to himself” (v.20).

Two implications are relevant: (i): The “all” whose sins God counted against Christ and whose penalty he bore are those whose sins he does not count. Indeed, he counts Christ’s righteousness to them, thus reconciling them to himself in Christ. (ii): This reconciliation is both a finished and sufficientwork. It is to be received by faith, not completed by it. The sins of the “all” being imputed to Christ (v.21), they are no longer counted against those (the “all”) for whom the atonement has been made. Augus- tus Montague Toplady’s question is a propos :

118 Hath not the Father put to grief His spotless Son for me? And will the righteous Judge of men, Condemn me for that debt of sin, Which, Lord, was charged on Thee?

II: THE LOGIC OF THE APPLICATION OF RECONCILIATION: Paul also develops here the connection between the once-for-all historical accomplishment of reconciliation and its ongoing existential application. Its finished nature secures its ongoing effect. Follow Paul’s logic again. • Verse 14: One died (apethanen) for all; therefore those “all” also died (apethanon).

Notice the force of Paul’s “therefore”: Negatively, he does not say: (i): “Since one died for all, therefore all must have been dead” (i.e. in sins, Eph. 2:1). (ii): “Since one died for all, therefore all must die” (i.e. for their own sins, Rom. 6:23). (iii): “Since one died for all, therefore all must die” (i.e. “to self”—this is a fruit of Christ’s death, v.15, it is not the meaning of v.14). Positively, he does say: Paul affirms that the “all” for whom Christ died also died in his death (v.14). The repetition in the same context of the same verb (apothnēskō) in the same (aorist) tense implies the reference is to the same event. It is in Christ’s death that “all have died” (cf. the similar aorist of apothnēskō in Romans 6:2 and Colossians 3:3). • The existential implication is that these “all” “no longer live for themselves” but for Christ “who for their sake died and was raised again” (v.15). Those united to Christ federally enter the new creation in union with him existentially (v.17).

119 Thus, Paul reasons that all for whom Christ died were so united with him in his death that they also may be said to have both died and been raised in and with him. Penal substitution by Christ and union with Christ are inseparable realities. This is how penal substitution actually works. This union with Christ here implies a chain of unbreakable links between (i) Christ’s death borne for the sins of the “all”; (ii) the non-imputation of their sins to the “all”; (iii) the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to the same “all”; and (iv) the fruit of this in the lives of the “all,” since they died and rose in him. For Paul there is no breach between the historic union with the “all” in Christ’s penal substitution for them and their existential union with him in its benefits Consider the incoherent implications if this is not so: (i) God did not count sins against the “all” for whom Christ died, but now does count them; (ii) Christ provided actual atonement and reconciliation which now neither atones nor reconciles; (iii) the “all” died in Christ’s death and were raised with him—yet now some of the “all” atoned for can undo those realities, render the atonement ineffective, and un-reconcile themselves although already reconciled in Christ. Any doctrine of unlimited penal substitution implies the in- effectiveness and disintegration of the objective accomplishment of Christ. At this point the gospel begins to unravel, and our Sa- viour’s work and glory are demeaned. It would take us beyond the scope of this essay to discuss the” double jeopardy” implied. But this brief look at 2 Corinthians 5:11–21 is sufficient to confirm the conclusion of Toplady’s “Faith Reviving”:

If thou hast my discharge procured, And freely in my room endured The whole of wrath divine:

120 Payment God cannot twice demand, First at my bleeding Surety’s hand, And then again at mine.

McLeod Campbell’s presupposition was right: penal substitution implies efficacious redemption. Expressed negatively, in terms of this essay’s title: If you loose particular atonement, you must lose penal substitution.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sinclair Ferguson is a Ligonier teaching fellow and Chancellor's Professor of Systematic Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary.

121 How Does the Cross of Christ Make Sense of the Kingdom of God?

Jeremy Treat

erspectives on Jesus have been offered from all over the world, but the voice of the man closest to the cross of Christ Phas rarely been heard. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Luke 23:42). How could this thief view a beaten, bloodied, and crucified criminal as one who rules over a kingdom? Maybe he was confused by the title “King of the Jews” on Jesus’ cross or by the crown of thorns on his head. Or perhaps, as Jesus’ response indicates, this man rightly saw the kingdom of God in the crucifiedChrist. Unfortunately today, many Christians either cling to the cross or champion the kingdom, usually one to the exclusion of the other. Countless books on the kingdom hardly mention Christ’s cross. Volumes on the cross ignore Jesus’ message of the kingdom. The polarization of these two biblical themes leads to divergent approaches: cross-centered theology that focuses on the salvation

122 of sinners or kingdom-minded activism that seeks to change the world. Whole churches or movements are built on one idea or the other. It’s as if we are left with a choice between either a kingdom without a cross or a cross without a kingdom; this false dichotomy truncates the gospel and cripples the church. Of course, one should not have to choose between biblical doctrines. And, as we will see, we can understand the kingdom and the cross as gloriously integrated within the whole counsel of God and the story of redemption. But first, before getting to the solution, we must first understand the problem.

KINGDOM VERSUS CROSS How did the church get to this unfortunate place of pitting important biblical doctrines against one another? Although there has always been confusion with or resistance to the paradoxical integration of kingdom and cross, such a stark division has not always been the case. In the first century, Barnabas declared that “the kingdom of Jesus is based on the wooden cross” (Epistle of Barna- bas 8:5).20 According to Augustine, “The Lord has established his sovereignty from a tree. Who is it who fights with wood? Christ. From his cross he has conquered kings.”21 Luther chastises those who “cannot harmonize the two ideas—that Christ should be the King of Kings and that He should also suffer and be executed.”22 The ugly ditch between the kingdom and the cross began to emerge after the Enlightenment and was particularly widened through America’s social gospel movement of the twentieth century. Walter Rauschenbusch, drawing from nineteenth-century German liberalism, emphasized the kingdom of God to the extent that he essentially eclipsed the cross. It’s not just that this move-

20 Michael Holmes, ed. and trans., The Apostolic Fathers in English (3rd ed.; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 186. 21 Augustine, Exposition of Psalm 95 (406–407), WSA 18:425. 22 Luther, Psalm 110 (1539), LW 13:344.

123 ment neglected the gospel of what God has done through Christ’s death and resurrection. Theyredefined the gospel to be a message about what we do in making the world a better place. H. Richard Niebuhr’s assessment of this theology is fitting: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”23 Conser- vatives reacted sharply by reclaiming the centrality of the cross, but often relegating the kingdom solely to the future or ignoring it altogether, thereby setting in place the defining feature of the history of this discussion: pendulum-swinging reductionism. The fact that two of the primary themes in Scripture have been torn apart and often turned against each other poses an enormous problem. We need a better way forward than “kingdom versus cross.” And it’s not enough to merely seek “kingdom and cross,” as if these were two competing values that need to be held in tension. The key is not balance, but integration. And that’s exactly what we find in Scripture, an unfolding narrative that weaves together atonement and kingdom like a crown of thorns, fit for a crucified king.

THE STORY OF VICTORY THROUGH SACRIFICE The kingdom and the cross ultimately come together in Christ, the one who reigns over the kingdom and suffers on the cross. But Jesus is not a generic superhero. He’s the Messiah, Israel’s long-awaited Savior who would fulfill all of God’s promises. This unfolding story of redemption provides the proper framework for understanding the connection between the kingdom and the cross. The story begins in a garden, and although the phrase “kingdom of God” does not appear until later, the concept of the kingdom of God has its roots in the soil of Eden. Genesis 1–2 portrays God as a loving king who rules over his good creation through

23 H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1937), 197.

124 his image-bearing people. And that’s how I define the kingdom: God’s reign through God’s people over God’s creation.24 But instead of ruling over the earth, Adam and Eve submit to the rule of one of its craftiest creatures—the serpent—thereby fracturing their relationship with God and collapsing the project aimed at God’s reign over all the earth. Instead of going forth from Eden to expand the blessing of God’s royal presence, they are banished from the garden to a wandering existence that instead spreads the curse. Yet even amidst rebellious treason, God would not give up on his kingdom project. From the cursed dirt of Eden, redemptive history sprouts forth with the promise of the “seed” of a woman who will crush the head of the serpent while suffering a bruised heel in the process (Gen. 3:15). The victory of the seed will reverse the curse and renew God’s creation. But while the end goal is still God’s reign over all the earth, the promise of victory now includes the price of suffering. Henceforth, a pattern emerges in the story of Adam and Israel whereby victory comes through suffering, exaltation through humiliation, and ultimately, the kingdom through the cross. The counterintuitive pattern of victory through sacrifice can be seen throughout the story of Israel. God makes a promise to Abra- ham to bless the nations and seals a covenant with a sacrifice. God redeems his people from slavery in Egypt through the blood of a sacrificial lamb. King David overcomes the giant through humble means, and his royalty is characterized by righteous suffering. The prophet Isaiah explicitly reveals how the victory of the kingdom hinges on the suffering of a servant. But while we find the pattern of victory through sacrifice throughout the Old Testament, this pattern culminates in the coming of the Messiah.

24 For a more thorough understanding of the kingdom of God, see Jeremy Treat, Seek First: How the Kingdom of God Changes Everything (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2019).

125 THE CRUCIFIED KING Jesus came proclaiming the kingdom of God but his royal mission led him to a gruesome death on a Roman cross. From an earthly perspective, it certainly appeared that the cross represented the failure of Christ’s kingdom mission. The Gospel of Mark, however, subtly yet powerfully shows that the cross is not a stumbling stone to the kingdom of God; it is its cornerstone. Mark’s account of the crucifixion is filled with royal imagery. Jesus is given a purple robe, a scepter in his hand, and a crown of thorns on his head (Mark 15:17). Even as he hangs on the cross, the sign above his head reads, “The King of the Jews” (Mark 15:26). Mark is showing through irony that the one mocked as king truly is king. But he’s a different kind of king. The onlookers ridicule Jesus, saying, “Save yourself, and come down from the cross!” (v. 30). Yet Jesus reveals his kingship not by coming down from the cross to save himself but by staying on the cross to save others. The cross is the greatest display of Christ’s reign as power controlled by love. According to Mark (and the other Gospels as well), the kingdom mission of Jesus does not terminate at the cross. Jesus is king on the cross: forgiving sin, defeating evil, and establishing God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. The cross is neither the failure of Jesus’s messianic ministry, nor is it a prelude to his royal glory. It is the apex of his kingdom mission. The splendor of God’s royal power shines brightest through the sacrificial death of the Son of God. The cross is the crowning achievement of Christ’s kingdom mission. In John’s account of the life of Christ, everything moves toward the climactic “hour” when Jesus, being “lifted up” on the cross, is truly being enthroned in glory (John 12:23–32; cf. 3:14, 8:28). The cross becomes not only the center of redemptive history but also the fulcrum upon which the logic of the world is turned upside

126 down. Shame is transformed into glory, foolishness into wisdom, and humiliation into exaltation. The cross is the throne from which Christ rules the world. We learn throughout the rest of the New Testament that the death of Christ is a multifaceted accomplishment within the narrative of God bringing his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. While the accomplishments of the cross are unending, the heart of the cross, out of which everything else flows, is substitutionary atonement. Christ died in our place, for our sins, to reconcile sinners to the God who is making all things new by grace. In sum, from the bruised heel of Genesis 3:15 to the reigning lamb of Revelation 22:1, the Bible is a redemptive story of a crucified messiah who brings the kingdom through his atoning death on the cross.

THE KINGDOM THROUGH THE CROSS How, then, can we summarize the relationship between the kingdom and the cross? While many rend asunder the kingdom and the cross, Scripture presents a mutually enriching relationship between the two that draws from the story of Israel and culminates in the crucifixion of Christ the king. The story of redemption -re veals that the promises of the kingdom (for example, victory over enemies, forgiveness of sin, new exodus) find their fulfillment primarily in the cross of Christ. Furthermore, kingdom and cross need not vie for position in the story of redemption because they play different roles. The cross is central (the climactic mid-point of the story) and the kingdom is te- lic (the end-goal of the story). The glory of God’s wisdom, however, is displayed in the manner that the end-time kingdom has broken into the middle of history through the death of the messiah. In short, the kingdom and the cross are held together by the Christ—Israel’s Messiah—who brings God’s reign on earth

127 through his atoning death on the cross. The kingdom is the ultimate goal of the cross, and the cross is the means by which the kingdom comes. The shocking paradox of God’s reign through Christ crucified certainly appears foolish to fallen human logic; however, perceived through faith, it is the very power and wisdom of God. To say that the kingdom is established by the cross certainly does not rule out or even minimize the importance of the other aspects of Christ’s saving work. The death of Christ is the decisive moment, though certainly not the only significant moment. God’s kingdom was present in Jesus’ life, proclaimed in his preaching, glimpsed in his miracles and exorcisms, established by his death, and inaugurated through the resurrection. It’s now being advanced by the Holy Spirit through the church, and will be consum- mated in Christ’s return.

A CROSS-SHAPED KINGDOM Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said, “A king who dies on the cross must be the king of a rather strange kingdom.”25 A strange kingdom indeed—for while the kingdoms of this world are built by force, the kingdom of God is founded on grace. Since God’s kingdom is established and forever shaped by the cross of Christ, we can say it truly is a cross-shaped kingdom. The cross creates a community of ransomed people living under the reign of God. The cross-shaped kingdom provides a framework for a life of devotion to the king. For through the cross, we are not only forgiven of our sins, but we are also made followers of our Savior. Jesus says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). To follow the king, we have to take up our crosses. Followers of Jesus are

25 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God Is on the Cross: Reflections on Lent and Easter (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2012), 69.

128 bound for glory. But whats true for Christ is also true for those who are “in Christ”: glory comes through suffering. As coheirs of the kingdom with Christ, “we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom. 8:17). As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Christianity has always insisted that the cross we bear always precedes the crown we wear.”26 The kingdom was established through the self-giving love of Christ, and it will be advanced through the self-giving love of his people. The kingdom comes through suffering and service. We are saved from sin and the kingdom of darkness, but we are saved for Jesus and his kingdom of light. The sacrificial love of God displayed in the cross creates a people who lovingly give of themselves for the well-being of others. The kingdom of God is marked by justice, and those who have been justified before God have more reason than any to seek justice for the weak, the poor, and the oppressed. And yet, to be clear, we do not build the kingdom for God, we receive it from God (Heb 11:28). The kingdom of God is not the culmination of human potential and effort but the intervention of God’s royal grace into a sinful and broken world.

THE KING OF THE JEWS AND THE CROWN OF THORNS Jesus was crucified with a title over his head that declared him to be a king. But while the title on Christ’s cross—“The King of the Jews”—makes explicit the connection between the kingdom and the cross, perhaps the crown of thorns provides the best image for explaining how they relate. The thorns, which were a sign of the curse and defeat of Adam, truly symboli- ze the paradoxical synthesis of Christ’s sovereign rule and his sin-bearing sacrifice. The twisted thorns picture how atonement and kingdom are interwoven throughout the grand story

26 Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010), 19.

129 of redemption as the goal of history and the means by which it is achieved. The kingdom comes in power, but the power of the gospel is Christ crucified.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jeremy Treat (PhD, Wheaton College) is pastor for preaching and vision at Reality LA in Los Angeles, California, adjunct professor of theology at Biola University, and a Council member of The Gospel Coalition.

130 The Love Story of Penal Substitutionary Atonement

Michael Lawrence

or centuries, the church has affirmed that penal substitutionary atonement stood at the heart of the gospel. Yes, the Fcross also demonstrates the love of God, his hatred of sin, and his commitment to ransom his people. But behind all of these ideas stands the logic of the cross, in which an innocent substitute is offered in place of the guilty, bearing both their guilt and shame, suffering their punishment and rejection, and so securing their forgiveness and acceptance by God. But lately, penal substitutionary atonement (PSA) has fallen on hard times. It’s come under fire as a cold, dry theological construct, inspired more by Western legal concepts than the biblical God of love. It’s been rejected as a monstrous distortion of the Father as a cosmic child abuser. And it’s been crowded out by more appealing stories of the cross as our ransom or our model of sacrificial love. These critiques have a lot of emotional power. People are “woke” to the fact that Western ways of thin-

131 king masquerading as Christianity have done a lot of damage. They’re aware of the horrors of child abuse that has ravaged so many of their friends, relatives, or even themselves. And they long for an explanation of the cross that is inspiring, not logical, empowering, not embarrassing. These are as much emotional barriers as they are theological, and if we’re going to teach and defend PSA as the heart of our salvation, we’ll need more than the dry logical arguments of systematic theology. After all, if it’s just a “theory” or logical construct, perhaps a better theory can be devised, a less emotionally charged construct developed. Thankfully, we have what we need in biblical theology. God has wired us for stories that speak to the heart as well as the head. And when we tell the biblical story of PSA, two things happen. Our minds begin to grasp that PSA is central to the entire storyline of Scripture. But just as importantly, our hearts begin to grasp that PSA is the story of God’s love.

NOT A THEORY, BUT A STORY Where does the story of penal substitution begin? It begins in Gene- sis 3. God had said that the day Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would die. And God was true to his word. When they disobeyed, they died spiritually, under the curse of God. But they didn’t die physically, at least not right away. Instead, two animals died, and God used their skins to fashion clothes to cover the shame of their nakedness (Gen 3:21). Nowhere is the language of sacrifice or substitution used, but the picture is unmistakable. Substitutes died physically to cover their physical shame. Fast forward to Genesis 22. God has entered into a covenant relationship with Abraham and his descendants, guaranteeing that covenant in Genesis 15. With an oath God promised that should he fail to keep the covenant, God himself would suffer the penalty of death. But now God has asked Abraham to sacrifice his

132 one and only son to the Lord. Is it because Abraham has sinned and broken the covenant? The text does not say. We’re simply told that Abraham obeyed. But at the moment he was about to slay Isaac, God not only stopped him, he provided a substitute in the form of a ram caught by his horns in a thicket. If it wasn’t clear before, substitution was now inescapable. Isaac lived because God provided another to take his place. It all comes to a climax at the Passover in Exodus 12. An unblemished lamb is slain, its blood spread on the doorposts, so that the family inside is spared the judgment of the angel of death. The people inside would eat the lamb, symbolizing their identification and participation with it and its fate. And from that point on, penal substitutionary atonement stands at the center of Israel’s relationship to the Lord. In every sin offering and every guilt offering, the worshipper lays hands on an unblemished animal, signifying that this animal represents this worshipper (Lev. 1, 4). The animal is slain, its blood is poured out on the altar, and the worshipper is accepted and reconciled to God. Day after day, week after week, month after month, these sacrifices were offered. And once a year, on the Day of Atonement, the High Priest, representing the entire nation, would offer a sacrifice for himself and a sacrifice for the people (Lev. 16). But unlike Passover or fellowship offerings, neither the priest nor the people would eat these sacrifices. They were whole burnt offerings. God alone would symbolically consume the sacrifice and the sin that sacrifice represented.

NOT A PROBLEM, BUT A SOLUTION Year after year, decade after decade, century after century, the penal substitution of an animal sacrifice stood at the center of Israel’s relationship with God. On the basis of those sacrifices, shame was covered and guilt removed. Because the animal took the punishment

133 they deserved, they not only lived another day but were accepted by God. Until the next time they sinned. Until the next Day of Ato- nement. Then the process would have be repeated. And it’s in that endless repetition that we realize the story of PSA was not finished. The problem is not that these sacrifices were brutal or unworthy of God. The problem is that they were ineffective. “In the sacrifices there is a reminder of sins year after year. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (Heb 10:3–4). And yet, substitutes were what God had been providing from the beginning. From the death of animals to cover Adam and Eve’s shameful nakedness, to the substitute for Isaac, to the unblemished Passover lamb and the Temple sacrifices, these partial, temporary, and ultimately ineffective substitutes were meant by God to teach us something. They were types and shadows of the perfect substitute that was to come. Isaiah spoke of this subsequent substitute in Isaiah 53. One whose blood could take away sin and cover shame. One whose death could secure the acceptance of the worshipper once and for all. One whose substitution was fully appropriate because he was fully human. One whose substitution was fully adequate because he was fully divine.

NOT LOGIC, BUT LOVE The author of Hebrews brings all the threads of this story together in Hebrews 10. Quoting Psalm 40 as if spoken by Jesus, he writes, “You did not desire sacrifice and offering, but you prepared a body for me. You did not delight in whole burnt offerings and sin offerings. Then I said, ‘See—it is written about me in the scroll—I have come to do your will, O God.” Animal sacrifices did not delight God, because animals could not finally represent humans in their sin. And so, God the Father prepared a body in the Incar- nation for God the Son. Animals were unwilling and unthinking substitutes. But the Son declares that his sacrifice is both volun-

134 tary and wholly obedient. “I have come to do your will.” Animals could only be physically unblemished. But the Son was morally unblemished (Heb. 9:14). Animals had to be sacrificed repeatedly. But the Son “after offering one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God.” Animal sacrifices and the priests who offered them had no enduring life to give anyone. But the Son’s priesthood is “based on the power of an indestructible life” (Heb 7:16), and his sacrifice was vindicated in resurrection to eternal life which he gives to all those who are called (Heb 9:14–15). The entire storyline of Scripture, the history of redemption, is the story of God providing substitutes for his people to cover their shame and bear the judgment they deserved so that they might be accepted by Him. That alone is a story of undeserved grace and amazing love. But all along, God’s plan and purpose was not only to provide that substitute, but to be that substitute in the person of his Son, bearing in himself the punishment we could not bear and the shame we could not overcome. Penal substitutionary atonement is no mere logical construct, nor a monstrous degradation of the character of God. And there is no more compelling story. For the story of PSA is the story of the passionate expression of God’s love. It is the pinnacle of his glory. Lose penal substitution, and we not only lose the story of redemption, we lose the love and glory of God. So pastors, let’s tell people that story. Not all at once, necessarily. But wherever we are in Scripture, don’t miss the opportunity to point out the hints and shadows, the preparation as well as the fulfillment, of the substitute God provided to take our place. As our people learn to see this story, they’ll also learn to recognize it for what it is—the greatest love story ever told.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Michael Lawrence is the senior pastor of Hinson Baptist Church in Portland, Oregon. You can find him on Twitter at @pdxtml.

135 God of the Cross: 5 Recommended Books on the Atonement

Owen Strachan

f you grew up in church, there’s a decent chance that you take penal substitution for granted. In other words, if your back- Iground is solidly evangelical, you might assume that everyone naturally affirms the atonement as the act by which Christ satisfied the law’s demands, assuaged the wrath of God, and cleansed guilty sinners of all their unrighteousness. But this assumption isn’t necessarily true. For many, commitment to penal substitutionary atonement (PSA) has eroded. Our paganized culture rejects the fundamental tenets of the Christian worldview, particularly the biblical doctrine of God that undergirds PSA. This erosion has had major effects on the evangelical movement. Pastors, therefore, need to help their people understand God’s justice and holiness as well as the central tenets of PSA. To do that, you might consider recommending these five books on this precious doctrine to your people.

136 THE HOLINESS OF GOD This classic by R. C. Sproul is not a technical monograph on the cross. But it unpacks the doctrine behind the doctrine. In other words, our doctrine of God undergirds our doctrine of the cross. God’s holiness necessitates the death of the Son of God. Unless the covenant people are washed white as snow, they cannot come into the God’s presence. Our discussions of the cross are not just about the dynamics of Jesus’ death. They are first about the character of God who must act justly and desires to act mercifully. Sproul unpacks this doctrine of God, even as he treats a closely-connected doctrine: justification by faith alone. Note this carefully: without the work of Christ, there is no justification by faith. If God is not perfectly holy and also perfectly loving, there will be no atonement, and thus no salvation at all. We could put it this way: show me your doctrine of God, and I’ll show you your doctrine of atonement. In order to build trust in the doctrine of the atonement, we must do more than talk only about the cross. We must show our people the biblical and theological backdrop of the cross of Christ. Sproul’s book helps establish the character of God, and thus sets us up to marvel at the beauty of the death of God’s Son.

THE CROSS OF CHRIST Among John Stott’s many contributions to the church, this book may be his greatest. Stott increased the evangelical understanding of Christ’s cross-work and—as much as anyone has—stan- dardized it. But his work is far from staid and stale. It is clearly written by a pastor who knows the weight of glory found in this doctrine, and knows as well just how badly fallen humanity needs it. Stott understood, as we all must, that the cross of Christ is not one chapter in the incarnation of the Son of God, but the turning point of history. At a personal level, the cross is the hin- ge of every human destiny. The cross, after all, is not a matter of

137 so-called “academic theology”; it was our sin that drove Christ to his death. Do we look there to find our forgiveness? Or do we look there and see only an accident of history, unrelated to our daily goings-on? Beyond his pastoral burden, Stott found a way to integra- te both the motif of expiation (the cleansing of sinners) and the motif of Christus Victor into a theology of the crucifixion that features PSA at the center. In doing so he navigated deftly the debates some decades prior over whether the cross achieved the propitiation of divine wrath or washed away the sins of the guilty. Stott’s overarching point on this matter: Jesus’ death accomplished both these ends. Subsequent scholars and pastor-theologians have concurred, resulting in a vision of the atonement that shimmers with glory, quivers with head-crushing intentionality, and drips with grace—grace for sinners just like us.

IN MY PLACE CONDEMNED HE STOOD Stott aside, no twentieth-century writer penned more penetra- ting reflections on the cross than J. I. Packer. This volume, edi- ted by Mark Dever, features several of Packer’s most illuminating and influential essays on the atonement. These are “The Heart of the Gospel,” “What Did the Cross Achieve,” and Packer’s justly famous introduction to John Owen’s The Death of Death in the Death of Christ. All of Packer’s books deserve to be bought and studied. (Read Leland Ryken’s marvelous J. I. Packer: An Evangelical Life to get context.) He rarely showed his colors better than in his occasional speaking and writing on the cross of Christ. Note as well that this volume bears Dever’s outstanding cover article for Christianity Today, “Nothing but the Blood.” If a pastor had little time to read, this would be the one volume to digest.

138 PIERCED FOR OUR TRANSGRESSIONS Steve Jeffery, Michael Ovey, and Andrew Sach represent watch- men on the wall who saw that the atonement was under attack. This book, published in 2007, is a gift to Christ’s blood-bought church. Their study is a scholarly treatment of the core biblical texts on the death of Christ, a historical treatment of important doctrinal contributions by past voices, and a response to numerous objections raised against the cross. This book is a work of profound courage and profound learning. In the example of these men—one thinks of the now-departed Mike Ovey in particular—we see what theology should be: a service to the church for the church. I cannot overstate the helpfulness of this volume. No pastor should enter ministry today, when attacks on the work of Christ proliferate, and fail to study this book, going page by page, working slowly through every line. The last 100 pages cover nearly every major argument leveled against PSA. The authors not only consider “academic” challenges, but also more popular arguments. As those who minister truth to the people of God each week, pastors should devour this material, and thus be ready to “dismantle strongholds” mounted against God’s Word, including the crown jewel of all history and all Scripture: Christ’s atoning death (see 2 Cor. 10:3–6).

THE CRUCIFIED KING This book is a little different than the four previous recommen- dations. Jeremy Treat authored a rich and eye-opening study on how Christ’s cross and Christ’s kingdom are linked. These two doctrines are often isolated from one another, but they shouldn’t be. The cross brings the kingdom; the kingdom of the Son of God is a kingdom of the cross. Treat also helpfully reflects on the resurrection, which he rightly sees as bound up with Scripture’s

139 doctrine of the atonement. Too often, theologians in our day seem to think that they can choose either the cross or the empty tomb as the lodestar of their theology. In truth, the two events stand or fall together. Treat’s study is an example of what Kevin Vanhoozer calls “theological imagination.” It does not, in other words, make something up out of biblical items, but rather weaves together doctrines in Scripture that are crying out for synthesis. The earlier volumes serve the church by defending the cross; this text serves the church by helping us see all biblical teaching as a seamless garment, with accurate biblical theology leading into magisterial systematic theology.

OTHER COMMENDABLE BOOKS It’s almost humorous to recommend just five books about the central event of human history. In truth, students, pastors, and laypeople should go far beyond these books. They should buy and study texts like D. A. Carson’s popular (but extremely shrewd) Scandalous, which makes the important point that we cannot divide Christ’s teaching ministry from his atoning ministry as many try to do. Instead, all Christ’s teaching points toward his atoning work. Carson’s chapters were originally sermons and talks, as was the material in It is Well by Dever and Michael Lawrence. This book is an excellent resource for pastors tackling key biblical texts on the atonement. Reaching back into history, Anselm’s classic study Cur Deus Homo (Why Did God Become Man?) does not offer the full-orbed atonement doctrine referenced above, but it’s a valuable text that nonetheless makes important contributions to our understanding of the cross, among them the insight that only God can save, but only a human being can represent other human beings—hence the coming of the man Christ Jesus. At the technical level, Brian

140 Arnold’s study of Ignatius’s view of the work of Christ satisfactorily rebuts the idea promoted widely by T. F. Torrance and others that the early church abandoned the Pauline focus on the atonement. Arnold’s Justification in the Second Century is both extremely ex- pensive and very important; one hopes that he will publish a more accessible volume in days ahead, as his study (completed under Michael Haykin) is a valuable one, an example of high-level intellectual labor that has great relevance to the church’s life, practice, and confession. The doctrine of the atonement is the heart of Scripture. This doctrine doesn’t boil down to one verse, or three verses, or ten verses, or forty verses. Penal substitutionary atonement is a whole-Bible doctrine. It proceeds from theology proper, derives from the promise of a head-crushing deliverer in Genesis 3, and culminates in the eschatological dwelling of the blood-bought people of God in the New Jerusalem. The cross solves the problem of how a just God, a God wrathful against sin, can be a merciful God, a God who saves sinners to the uttermost. The book above every book to read is the book that exalts Christ above every name, but not a Christ of unblemished solitude—a Christ of the cross.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Owen Strachan is a theology professor at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and the coauthor, with Gavin Peacock, of The Grand Design: Male and Female He Made Them. You can find him on Twitter at @ostrachan.

141 Pastoring Abuse Sufferers with the Doctrine of Penal Substitutionary Atonement

Mez McConnell

t the center of the Christian faith hangs a bloody, broken man. Beaten, humiliated, scourged and put to death in Aone of the most barbaric, cruel punishments devised by men. It’s one of the things that makes the Christian faith so distas- teful to unbelievers. But, if people find that hard to swallow, then Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA) is in another despised category on its own. What is PSA and why is it so controversial? The doctrine of penal substitution states that God gave himself in the person of his Son to suffer instead of us the death, punishment, and curse due to fallen humanity as the penalty for sin.

142 PSA is based on the belief that God is simultaneously loving and holy. Because he is holy, he hates sin and must punish it justly. Because he is love, he is not willing that any should perish. The- refore, in Jesus, God becomes man. He lived among us perfectly and sinlessly. He then dies a death on our behalf. In doing so, He received the full, terrible wrath of God that was our due. This is how Paul describes it in 2 Corinthians 5:21: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Understandably, this doctrine upsets a lot of people. They cannot begin to comprehend how a loving father could do that to his perfect son. How is this not “cosmic child abuse” on a global, spiritual scale? How can Christians believe in a God who willfully sent his innocent Son to die in such a cruel way? I understand the reaction. I suffered childhood abuse in all its forms: physical, emotional, and sexual. Furthermore, I live in and minister to communities that bear the deep scars of historic, repeated abuse on a massive scale. (For a closer look at the kind of community I live in, check out this 2011 report on child abuse in the UK.) As a former victim and as a pastor to the abused, then, I wish to look at some of the practical implications of holding to PSA. I don’t want us to circle in the theological air, but to come into land on the painful, messy runway of our fallen world.

PSA NOT “COSMIC CHILD ABUSE” We must first reject the view that sees the cross as an angry father murdering his innocent Son for the sake of guilty humanity. Jesus went willingly to his death. Jesus allowed himself to be taken when Roman soldiers and an angry mob of religious leaders found him in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night of his arrest. Jesus allowed himself to be put on trial—even though he and the Jewish

143 leaders knew it was illegal (the Jews couldn’t try people at night or in secret). Jesus didn’t speak a word in his own defense as he stood in front of Pilate, the Roman governor. Time and again Jesus warned his disciples that he had come to die. Three times he tells them so in John 10.

“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” (John 10:11)

“Just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep.” (John 10:15)

“The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again.” (John 10:17)

Then comes the real clincher in John 10:18. “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.” Notice what Jesus is saying: “Nobody takes my life from me.” What Jesus did on the cross, he did willingly. He knew what was coming. He wasn’t manipulated. He wasn’t dragged into it by forces outside of his control. He knew there would be pain, suffering, and humiliation—and, incredibly, he willingly embraced it. On behalf of guilty sinners. When people today are abused, they are unwilling victims cruelly exploited by evil adults. They are forced into perverted acts they do not fully understand. They are exploited for the gra- tification of another. So it was in my childhood. Jesus, on the other hand, died to glorify both himself and the Father as well as to save his people from their sins. The good news for us is that he was innocent. Yet he was not a helpless victim.

144 SHEPHERDING THOSE WHO’VE FACED ABUSE What does this mean for pastors and preachers as they seek to shepherd those who’ve faced abuse and terrible trauma?

1. Don’t rush to immediate forgiveness and healing in our preaching and counsel. Here’s where we so often go wrong in our preaching. We can preach the story of Joseph (as an example) and in our effort to get to the application we arrive too quickly at Genesis 50:20. Here we read of Joseph, standing before his brothers, and telling them, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” And so we tell our people to, “Go and do likewise.” But in doing so, we strip the narrative of all of its pain, suffering, and great emotional trauma. We fail to take our people on Joseph’s heart-wrenching journey. He didn’t get from a well to the throne room of Egypt in one giant bound. He didn’t go from pain, rejection, and torment to forgiveness in a single day. His story is brutal and heartbreaking. His own family tried to kill him! You would need a lifetime on a psychiatrist’s couch to unpack that alone. Do you think Joseph sat at the bottom of the well whist- ling, “All I Once Held Dear”? He would have been petrified. He would have been horrified. He would have been angry. He would have felt rejected and abandoned. Do you think, when his brothers decided to sell him to a passing caravan, that he went quietly? Do you think he went without a struggle? Wi- thout crying out for his beloved dad? Do you think he didn’t beg his brothers not to do it? That he would change his ways and not be so cocky anymore? That he was sorry? That they could keep the cloak? That he wouldn’t tell anyone what they’d done? Do you think he wasn’t sobbing into his hands, as his

145 home passed far from sight, while being dragged along by strangers to an unknown future? When he was sold to Potiphar, do you think he didn’t pine for home? That he didn’t lie in his new bed at night and think all sorts of evil about his brothers? That he didn’t replay every detail in his head? That he wasn’t thinking in almost every waking moment of how he would one day pay them back? Do you think he wasn’t crying out for justice? Do you think that when Potiphar’s wife falsely accused him, he didn’t rage at the injustice of it and shake his fist at God? Do you think he did his 10-year sentence in the jail without wondering what his dad was up to? Without wondering what his brothers were doing? Do you think he didn’t scream with frustration into the night? That he didn’t question his worth? That he didn’t wonder about the point of his life? Do you think he didn’t feel shame and humiliation at all that had happened to him? Do you think he didn’t feel powerless as people and forces outside of his control manipulated and destroyed his life? Do you think he didn’t ache with every part of him for justice and vengeance on all who had wronged him? We so often want to preach our three-point sermons and make the lines clear and tidy. But life isn’t like that. Life doesn’t work in even, logical lines. The great application and comfort for those of us who have been abused is not the grand statement of Genesis 50:20. It’s the 13 chapters before that, as we see and hear and feel the struggles of a man who has been abused, tormented, neglected, used, and humiliated—and yet, because of the grace of God in his life, he came out the other side. Early on in my ministry in Scotland, a young woman began attending our church. It was clear that she was very disturbed. She rocked and moaned her way through the service, speaking softly to herself the whole time. She had gouge marks on her face. We came to realize later that almost her entire body was

146 covered in scars from self-harming. She told us that she had been in and out of psychiatric holding units for most of her life. She was in a world of pain. She’d been in churches that thought she was demon possessed and that the answer to her issues lay in deliverance. She’d been told by well-intentioned believers to take hold of the promise of Genesis 50:20. She was told that she needed not only to repent of her own sins but forgive those who had hurt her in the past. As I sat on the steps outside our church building and spoke to her it was clear that she knew that she was a sinner. “But I can’t follow Jesus if it means I have to forgive my abusers,” she told me. “You don’t get to heaven by forgiving your abusers,” I told her. “You get there my repenting of your sins. Forgiveness and healing often come a long time down the road.” I recounted the story of Joseph’s life and the trauma he went through. “His healing came over decades,” I told her. “Just give yourself to the Lord and join our church and we will walk with you through whatever pain it is you are going through.” It was the beginning of a long, hard road for her. It wasn’t until Christmas, a few months later, that her full story came out. During a carol service at the church she became hysterical and violent—so much so that we had to call the police and ask for her to be sectioned for her own safety. We soon discovered that between the ages of 3 and 16 her father and uncles systematically raped her and forced her to sing Christmas carols while doing so. They’d never been caught, and they’d never been prosecuted. And so she was locked in a world of torment and pain. There were no easy answers and quick fixes for her. We just had to walk with her through her darkest moments and celebrate even the briefest glimpses of light in her troubled life. She needed the reassurance from us that one day, though it may be far off in the distant future, she may have her own Genesis 50:20 moment. She was nowhere near there yet. And we needed

147 to reassure her that this was okay. She was saved, but she was still in extreme shock. She was still stuck down the spiritual well of abuse, looking up and only seeing the faces of her tormentors. She still felt trapped in the dark dungeon of her memories, thinking dark thoughts and wondering if there was going to be an escape from the hell that was her life. Fellow pastors, let’s remind ourselves that justification may be instantaneous for a Christian, but healing for deep trauma is often a long and labored process. Some wounds are deeper than others, and forgiveness and reconciliation with past abuse will be slow. Some new believers are going to feel anger for a very long time. They’re going to ache for justice for a very long time. And somebody needs to tell them that it’s okay to feel that way. That what the abused feel is normal. We’re not second-rate Christians because we haven’t forgiven our abusers—or because we haven’t managed to work through our theology of reconciliation. But, like Joseph, we can come to a point in our lives, where we may not understand why we went through what we went through, but we can at least see some redemptive reason in it. You see, the point of the story is not Joseph. The point of the story is to help us look past him, to a better Joseph. To King Jesus. We follow a God who loves us and who voluntarily came to earth to be beaten scorned, rejected and humiliated. Why? So that we could live. So that, even if our broken past cannot be restored, our souls can be mended and we can look forward to a glorious heaven without tears or pain. And even though we may be at the start of our painful journey toward the light of God’s love; even if we’re a little farther on in our understanding; even if we’re coming through the other side—only in Christ will we all get there one day. Perhaps never in this life, but certainly in the one to come. That, my friends, is how we preach the story of Joseph.

148 2. Teach them PSA in order to show them that God is a God of justice. PSA brings great comfort to those who have suffered abuse because they begin to understand God’s holy justice. PSA teaches us that God means to punish all sin. In other words, nothing gets swept under the rug. Nothing goes unaddressed. Nobody ‘gets away with it’ so to speak. Abuse sufferers need to know that God takes what happened to them very seriously indeed. In fact, he views the crimes against them as damnable. Literally. We worship a good and just God and we can be sure that he will address all evil, either at the cross or in the final judgement. There will be no excuses and no escape for the perpetrators of vile acts who may have escaped justice in this life. God will address their sin and his wrath will be terrible to behold. Remember what I said at the beginning. Our faith centers on a bloody, broken man who was beaten, humiliated, scourged and put to death in one of the most barbaric, cruel punishments possible. Why so horrific? Because that’s how bad sin is. It is a grievous offence to his holy nature. But, we need to comfort our people with the truth that God is not indifferent to their suffering. When they look to Jesus on the cross, he is saying, “I get it. What happened to you is horrible. Such abuse deserves the full hurricane and holocaust of God’s wrath. I and my Father have therefore cons- pired to both save sinners in love and vanquish such injustice in judgment. Either or I shall pay the penalty it or the sinner shall pay it.” Then compare PSA to other views of the atonement, ones which deny that Christ paid the penalty in our place. These views cannot make the same claim—that God means to punish all injustice, and that every injustice will be exhaustively and completely addressed. It would seem that, for all who are saved, any injustices they committed remain unaddressed, unpunished, basically unnoticed. “Love outweighs the offense,” they say. Okay, that may

149 be true, but doesn’t love also insist the offense must be punished? PSA says, “Yes, absolutely.” Other views say no. PSA gives us both love and justice. That’s what we need to teach our people. It isn’t ‘pie in the sky’ doctrine, nor is it cosmic child abuse. It’s the only view of the atonement which gives them the peace of mind that though their abusers may never face human justice, there will one day be a full reckoning as they stand before God to give account for their evil sins.

3. Teach them that seeking justice is biblical, but vengeance is not. As I said, PSA reveals to us this God of justice. That’s challen- ging to believe because most of our abusers never face justice in their lifetime. Their crimes are denied or brushed under the car- pet. Abusers and tormentors get away because they do things in the dark: manipulation, deception, and lying. I have a young man that I regularly counsel who was horri- fically abused as a boy. As with the overwhelming majority of cases, it was at the hands of family members. He is now approaching his early thirties and all he feels is rage inside. And the older he gets, the angrier he becomes. All he dreams about is vengeance. All he wants to do is hunt own his abusers and kill every last one of them. He wants to follow Jesus, but this rage consumes him. As we pastor men and women in similar mindsets, we must be clear to them about this: one day, every terrible deed will be brought into that awful light, and every abuser will give account to Almighty God. Even though we may not see justice on this earth, God will ultimately dispense his perfect justice on that final, terrible day. I asked him once why he didn’t pursue justice through the courts against his abusers. “Because I’ll look stupid and weak. Be- cause everybody will know my business. Plus, it’s humiliating.” I

150 told him that I respected that. I had great empathy for him. But I also told him that he couldn’t allow bitterness and rage to eat away at his life like this. He needed to understand that if he wasn’t going to pursue earthly justice, then he should entrust the situation to God. After all, God’s justice will ultimately win the day. At the same time, he had to understand that vengeance doesn’t honour God. “That’s hard.” He said to me. “I don’t care about justice. I just want to kill them.” He’s right. It is hard. Very hard. I continue to walk with him and pray that one day he will come to place his trust fully in Jesus and lay all his threats of vengeance at the foot of the cross.

4. Never push abuse victims into reconciliation with their abuser(s). Should we be reconciled to our abuser(s)? That’s not an easy thing to answer. We certainly shouldn’t force sufferers to be reconciled to their tormentors in our pastoral counsel. I’m not saying reconciliation is impossible. I’m simply saying that we shouldn’t force people into things outside their control. Abuse is all about control. We need to give people space and time.

5. Help people to see that there is life after abuse. Abuse doesn’t have to define us. We become new creations in Jesus. We need to train our brains and our emotions to believe that God loves us. We need to constantly remind ourselves to believe the gospel. We may not be completely healed this side of eternity, but if we stick close to Jesus and his people, we can learn to avoid bitterness and self-pity.

6. Child abusers and rapists can be born again by God’s Spirit. God’s love even extends to these people. That’s a hard truth to swallow for those of us who have been abused. But it is the gospel. Either they will be punished, or Christ will have been punished

151 in their place, as I said a moment ago. It’s good news, of course, because this is how any of us have hope. However, this doesn’t mean that an abuser should go to the same church as their victims. This requires discernment and vigi- lance. Every effort should be made to protect victims at all costs.

7. Don’t downplay people’s pain as they age. A few years ago, I remember trying to tell my uncle about what happened to me as a child. He responded, “Get over it, Mez. It was years ago.” That’s easier said than done. In fact, the older we become the more it can trouble us. It’s not as easy as just putting it out of our minds. When we reach adulthood and begin to better comprehend what happened to us, the pain and frustration can become all-encompassing. Then, when we have our own children, we wonder how we could have been treated so terribly. Does that mean that we will always feel like this way? Yes, and no. Yes, I am afraid there are no take-backs in our lives. What has happened to us has happened to us. The memories will always be there. But no, those incidents don’t have to define us. By God’s grace, I am not a victim of childhood abuse anymore. But I am a sufferer. What happened to me does not define me anymore because I am a child of God. I view my life and my expe- riences through the lens of the Bible and the truth of God the Son’s atoning sacrifice on my behalf. I don’t understand precisely why my past occurred, but I trust God enough to handle my future. It’s not an easy walk, but it’s the only one that brings freedom and peace.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mez McConnell is senior pastor of Niddrie Community Church in Edinburgh, Scotland. He is founder of 20Schemes, a ministry that seeks to plant churches among some of Scotland's poorest communities. You can find him on Twitter at @mez1972.

152 The Necessity of Penal Substitution for Suffering Saints

Whitney Woollard

omeone recently asked if I knew what it felt like to have my life taken from me. It was a rhetorical question. I answered Sanyways, “Yeah, I really do.”

A SNAPSHOT OF MY SUFFERING Almost four years ago, my husband and I contracted Lyme disease with its accompanying coinfections, viruses, and inflammatory conditions. I had crushing fatigue, brain fog, radiating pain, twit- ching and tremors, insomnia, depression, dizziness, nausea, and infections from my face to my ankles. It took two years to get a diagnosis and by then I had steadily deteriorated from the vibrant fireball people knew and loved to “Neal Woollard’s sick wife.” I worked hard to maintain my high energy and fast-paced life, but as treatment began I watched it all slip away. I missed writing

153 deadlines, cancelled discipleship meetings and teaching events, and stepped back from opportunities I had dreamt about. I was losing everything but all I could think about was sleep. I just wanted to sleep. Who was this? I’m now two years into treatment and remain positive, but we don’t expect remission in the immediate future. Even then, there’s always the possibility of a relapse. I’ve taken a sabbatical from the work I’ve poured my life into so I can spend my days managing symptoms, taking meds, doing therapeutic exercise and detox, going to appointments, and calling insurance. I’m 32. Most people my age are having children, buying homes, and settling into careers. I’m hoping my veins will work at the next blood draw. So, yes, I know what it’s like to feel as if life has been taken from me.

THE GOOD NEWS OF PENAL SUBSTITUTIONARY ATONEMENT But it hasn’t. The doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement (i.e., theological shorthand to explain Jesus substituting himself in the sinner’s place to bear the penalty of sin) reminds me of that every day. It tells me that my greatest loss is not that of health, energy, ministry opportunities, or even personal identity, but the loss of relationship with God because of sin. Apart from Christ, I was a sinner by nature and choice. I deserved the just penalty of sin—death and hell. But God sent his son Jesus as an atoning sacrifice to live the perfect life I never lived and then die the death I should have died to reconcile me back to himself. At the cross, Jesus willingly took on God’s wrath in my place in order to give me his perfect life and righteousness. Through faith and repentance, I now experience reconciliation with God and unbroken fellowship with him in this age and the one to come. Though it feels like disease has taken my life, the reality is I’ve been given true life in Christ.

154 This doctrine, which is central to the gospel, keeps me sane and secure amid suffering. Despite the fancy name, “penal substitutionary atonement” isn’t some theological mumbo-jumbo that has no bearing on real life; it is life. I can wake up and face another symptom-ridden day with faith intact knowing that my greatest problems—sin, death, and eternal judgment—has been dealt with through Jesus. For example, when bed-ridden and plagued by guilt, penal substitution tells me that Jesus willingly bore all the guilt and wrath of God for my sin so there’s no longer any sacrifice to offer to make myself more acceptable to God (Romans 3:25–26, 6:23, and 8:1–4). Simply put, God is pleased with me! Through Christ I can rest and heal beneath the divine smile. This also assures me that the penalty of my sin has been paid. Therefore, no suffering I experience is punishment or condemnation for something I’ve done (Romans 8:1). I may not know all the ways God is using my pain, but I do know he’s not using it to punish me. I could give one example after another of how the saving life and death of Jesus undergirds my suffering. In fact, I wrote the following truths on a large whiteboard next to my desk because they’ve become so central to how I process my pain. Because Jesus died in my place for my sins:

1. I am not guilty (Romans 3:25–26; 6:23; 8:1). 2. I am not cursed (Galatians 3:13–14). 3. I am not defeated (Colossians 2:14–15; Hebrews 2:14–15). 4. I am not crushed (Isaiah 53:5; 2 Corinthians 4:8–10). 5. I am not forsaken (Mark 15:33–36; Hebrews 13:5–6). 6. I am not unclean (2 Corinthians 5:21; 1 Peter 2:24). 7. I am not without hope (Romans 5:1–11; 8:18-39).

These truths don’t invalidate or minimize the real experience of pain. Nor are they some magical quick fix. I still had to ice my ankles and put on compression gloves (in addition to my daily

155 regimen of meds, detox, etc.) so I could write this morning. I’m hurting from head to toe. That’s real! But they anchor me so that I don’t become truly lost when I’m adrift in a sea of symptoms. That’s what I mean when I speak about penal substitution being grounding—it offers the deeper reality undergirding my current reality. No matter what I face, I can walk, or sometimes crawl, into every day with the unshakable hope that my greatest need—rescue from the just wrath of God—has been met in Christ. If God in his goodness has done the greater, then I’m confident he will carry me through these lesser, momentary afflictions.

A DOCTRINE SUFFERING SAINTS CAN’T AFFORD TO LOSE Why all the talk about objective reality? And why expose my weak- ness and frailty in such detail? Because I want to highlight the subjective nature of the sufferer’s day-to-day experience and speak to the stabilizing power of penal substitution. I think that’s best done through a concrete example because we never suffer generically; we suffer personally and particularly. Right now, my life is chao- tic because of chronic illness. Yours might be because of mental illness or death or cancer or strained relationships or disability or aging parents or sexual confusion. Or, more likely, a whole host of reasons. The reasons for our pain are different but the subjective nature of it—the chaos, the confusion, the doubts, the despair, the frustration, all of it—is a shared human experience. That’s why suffering saints need the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement. We need something to keep us attached to our hopeful reality when we’re spinning out. It’s like my friend who likens her experience of suffering to an astronaut floating in the black void of space attached to the spacecraft by one braided steel tether. All analogies break down, but I see penal substitution (when understood appropriately as central to the gospel) as that steel tether that keeps us from floating into the abyss of false be-

156 liefs. When cancer or sudden loss or job cuts come knocking, we need to know that we know God is good and undeniably for us. Penal substitution assures us he is both. That’s why it pains me to see the current evangelical trend away from penal substitution to more subjective theories of the atonement. Today people want to focus on how the atonement demonstrates God’s love for us or how it offers an example to follow in suffering or how it brings about peace in a broken world. All of this is true about the cross, but only inasmuch as penal substitution lies at its heart. Without the objective reality of penal substitution, these views shift the emphasis of the atonement from Jesus’ finished work on the cross to our experiential response to it—a response, mind you, that sufferers are often too exhausted to conjure up. I’ll let the scholars work out the details of what that means for evangelicalism at large. I’m simply here to point out that so much stability has been taken from sufferers like myself that we can’t afford to lose the certain hope that penal substitution offers. Allow me to elaborate. If the weight of the atonement rests on our ability to respond to it, it’s no longer good news. It’s simply another thing we can fail at when our lives unravel. Prominent theories like the moral influence theory, example theory, or governmental theory tell us to meditate on the cross until we’re moved by God’s love for us or to look at Jesus’s example in suffering and do likewise or to contemplate the cross and realize how bad sin really is. All good things. But apart from the objective satisfaction of justice that comes through Jesus willingly dying the sinner’s death and appeasing the wrath of God, how do these theories not turn the gospel into law? And if the gospel is turned into something we must do, what about those of us who can’t do anything? I want to suffer perfectly like Jesus, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run to Netflix and bed rather than the Bible. I want to be

157 moved by the cross, but many times the detachment that comes with brain fog prevents me from feeling anything. That’s why penal substitution is such good news for suffering saints. It tells us that Jesus suffered perfectly in our place and then died for our sins so that justice would be satisfied and we could freely enjoy the life and love of God regardless of whether we’re having a “good day” or a “bad day.”

THE MOST LOVING THING GOD COULD DO I’m not here to build and tear down straw men. I think a worthy desire to highlight the love of God in a society that’s thankfully becoming increasingly sensitive to injustice, abuse, and suffering drives many of the subjective theories of the atonement. That’s not bad. I, too, want the world to know how good and loving God is. But as a sufferer right in the thick of it, I’m telling you the most loving thing God has done for mankind is bringing about perfect justice by offering up his perfect and willing Son as a sacrifice for our sins. Because of this unshakeable historical fact, we can face any trial, including the greatest ones—death and judgment—knowing that we are saved from wrath and promised a life of eternal joy in God’s presence. What goodness! What mercy! What unshakable hope and true life for those who suffer!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Whitney Woollard is a writer, speaker, and women’s Bible teacher in Portland, Oregon, where she and her husband Neal attend Hin- son Baptist Church. She holds her M.A. in biblical and theological studies from Western Seminary and loves sharing her passion for the Bible and good theology with others. You can check out her work at her website, www.whitneywoollard.com.

158 Why Penal Substitutionary Atonement Matters for Counseling

Patti Withers

was a murderer. When I was twenty-five I became pregnant. Unsaved, unma- Irried, and raised in a church that taught that babies weren’t human until they were born, the solution to my “problem” was nauseatingly simple. So, I made an appointment, had the procedure, took a few days off from work, and went back to life as usual. It was only after the Lord saved me that I realized the weight of what I’d done. The sin was so heinous and irreparable, and the guilt and shame were so overwhelming, that it was nearly ten years before I told anyone other than my husband what I had done. I believed that God had forgiven me of my sin of abortion, and yet my guilt and shame lingered.

159 What I lacked was an understanding and application of the substitutionary atonement of Christ. My lingering guilt and shame were a result of not really understanding that, in addition to forgiveness, my salvation also brought me justification and a right standing with God. The wrath of God that I justly deserved has been completely satisfied by Christ; therefore, God removed the guilt of my sin and granted to me the righteousness of Christ (Ps. 103:12, Rom. 3:21–22). Understanding penal substitutionary atonement is essential to every believer’s life because knowing that we are right with God effects how we think about and relate to him, ourselves, and others. Penal substitutionary atonement is also vital for counseling, since some of the difficulties that often lead to our need for counseling stem from wrongly thinking about or failing to rightly apply this doctrine to our lives. As counselors, we must help our counselees see that because of Christ’s substitutionary atonement they can have relief from guilt and shame, a proper view of forgiveness, and access to the Father.

RELIEF FROM GUILT AND SHAME Like I was after my abortion, many of my counselees are burdened with guilt and shame over their sins. These sins may be recent or go back as far as their childhood, and even though they have confessed them to God and sought reconciliation where needed, they still find themselves tormented by guilt. Whether this torment comes from the counselee’s flesh or the enemy, the solution is the same. Their guilty and shameful thoughts must be taken captive and they must begin to think on what is true about their sin in light of Christ’s work on the cross (1 Cor. 10:5; Phil. 4:8). As their counselor, it’s my job to help them do so by applying the truth about substitutionary atonement to their lives. As Paul wrote to the Colossians:

160 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross (Col 2:13–14).

Through Christ’s work on the cross, God has forgiven us, justified us, and cancelled our sin-debt. So, lingering thoughts and feelings of guilt and shame are out of place and may arise from unbelief. Who, including ourselves, can condemn the one whom God hast justified? (Rom. 8:33–34)

A PROPER VIEW OF FORGIVENESS But not every counselee seeks out counseling because of guilt or shame. Some come because they’ve been sinned against—often in grievous ways—and forgiveness seems impossible to them. I believe that understanding penal substitutionary atonement helps these counselees in a couple significant ways. First, it helps them to understand the magnitude of God’s hatred for all sin. Because God is holy and just, his wrath against sin is not easily satisfied and his forgiveness is not easily obtained. In fact, all sin is so heinous to God that his forgiveness could only be obtained by the shedding of his Son’s blood (Heb 9:22). If Christ didn’t bear their offender’s sin, then the offender will bear it in hell for all of eternity. Vengeance is the Lord’s, and we can trust him to repay. Second, penal substitutionary atonement helps them to ex- tend forgiveness. Understandably, those who have been grievous- ly sinned against can struggle to forgive. But if left unconfessed, unforgiveness can turn into the sins of bitterness, anger, or even revenge. Nothing helps the believer forgive others like an understanding of the price Christ paid in order for us to be forgiven! Paul puts it this way in his letter to the Ephesians:

161 Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you (Eph. 4:32).

By understanding and applying this great truth, we can help our counselees find strength to forgive, and to keep on forgiving.

ACCESS TO THE FATHER Access to the Father is perhaps one of the sweetest and most comforting implications of penal substitutionary atonement. The struggling counselee needs to be reminded that the door to the Father has been flung wide open for them by the death of Christ! Peter puts it this way:

For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit (1 Pet. 3:18).

Gone is the wrath we justly deserved, absorbed by Jesus’ death, and in its place is a warm invitation to come. Because of the sacrificial work of Christ, the writer of Hebrews encourages us to “with confidence draw near to the throne of grace that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4:16). Substitutionary atonement matters for counseling because it’s vital to living out the Christian life. And as a counselor, I find it deeply encouraging to know that because of Christ’s work of atonement I can with confidence go with my counselee to our Father and find the help we need.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Patti Withers serves as the Women’s Ministry Director at Im- manuel Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky.

162 How to Explain Covenantal Headship to Your Members

Harry Fujiwara

ovenantal headship, also known as federal headship, refers to a relationship in which an individual represents a lar- Cger group and the actions of the representative are imputed onto the larger group. This idea is central to Paul’s argument in Romans 5:12–21. In explaining covenantal headship to your members, it will be helpful to walk them through three closely related biblical truths: total depravity, the virgin birth, and substitutionary atonement.

1. TOTAL DEPRAVITY We first come across the consequences of covenantal headship in the Bible in Genesis 3. As the federal head of mankind, Adam represented all of his posterity in the Garden of Eden. His obedience or disobedience to the command given to him by God would

163 be credited to all who would descend from him. Therefore, when Adam sinned, all of Adam’s descendants “died through one man’s trespass” (Romans 5:15). The principle of covenantal headship thus explains the doctrine of total depravity. Since all humans were “made sinners” (Romans 5:19) because of Adam’s sin, we’re not born tabula rasa but rather are “brought forth in iniquity” (Psalm 51:5). And because the wages of sin is death, Adam’s single act of disobedience condemned all of his descendants to physical, spiritual, and eternal death.

2. VIRGIN BIRTH A second important biblical truth related to covenantal headship is Jesus’ virgin birth. Covenantal headship implies that no man born in Adam could ever be our Savior. “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?” (Job 14:4) Any son of Adam would inherit Adam’s sin and would thus immediately be dis- qualified as Savior. But because Jesus has no human father, he did not inherit the congenital depravity that’s plagued the rest of mankind. He was neither a sinner by nature—because he did not have a human father—nor was he a sinner by choice—because he was God incarnate. The virgin birth makes Jesus an exception to Adam’s covenantal headship and moreover makes him uniquely qualified to be our Savior.

3. SUBSTITUTIONARY ATONEMENT The solution to our total depravity, however, is not simply the virgin birth. What’s required is a third doctrine related to covenantal headship: substitutionary atonement. Substitutionary atonement is the glorious truth that Jesus died in the place of sinners. On

164 the cross, Jesus takes upon himself all of his people’s sin and in exchange gives them his perfect righteousness. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). In the same way that the first Adam represented all of his progeny, and all of his progeny were credited with his disobedience, Jesus, the second Adam, represents all of his people. Therefore, all of his people are credited with his perfect obedience. Whereas Adam’s sin brought death and condemnation for all men, Christ’s righteous life and substitutionary death for sinners brought eternal life for all of his people. This is the crux of Paul’s argument in Romans 5: “For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:19). The covenantal headship of Christ is our only hope for salvation: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22).

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS However, even the clearest explanation of covenantal headship won’t be helpful for our members if it becomes a lofty idea with no practical relevance for the average Christian. As pastors, it’s our duty to explain theology in a way that leads our people to worship. So I’ll close with two precious implications of covenantal headship that have much practical value for every Christian. First, if we believe that all of Adam’s descendants died in sin with him through his covenantal headship, the inevitable conclusion is that we, as dead sinners, could not have saved ourselves. We must affirm that we contribute nothing to our salvation except that we were spiritually dead, just as Lazarus contributed nothing to his raising except that he was physically dead. This understanding allows us to adopt a biblical, God-centric view of our salvation in which he receives all the glory. We must move away from

165 decisionalism and toward the conviction that God himself has accomplished everything required to redeem his people. Second, if we understand that all of Christ’s elect have received his perfect righteousness through his covenantal headship, then we must conclude that any righteousness we have before God is found in what Christ has done as our representative, not in what we have done through our efforts. A proper understanding of covenantal headship frees us from the Sisyphean task of attempting to earn God’s favor through our own works and allows us to rest in the favor that Christ has earned on our behalf. Covenantal headship is a wonderful truth that has practical implications for every believer. May a proper understanding of our death in Adam and our life in Christ lead us all to worship God more!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Harry Fujiwara is the senior pastor of The First Baptist Church in the City of New York.

166 Explaining Penal Substitutionary Atonement in our Personal Evangelism

Elliot Clark

hat Jesus died for our sins is the most common, and perhaps most basic, statement of the Christian gospel. The Apostle TPaul described his evangelistic proclamation in much the same way: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3–4). Behind Paul’s concise statement stands a robust theology (in accordance with the Scriptures) which includes, among others, the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement (PSA). This article will not seek to articulate that doctrine. Rather, it will consider the role of explaining PSA in our evangelism as we seek to make sense of the bloody cross, the vanguard of our Christian gospel.

PATTERNS IN APOSTOLIC EVANGELISM When considering the priority of Jesus’s death for sin in evangelism, we must acknowledge at the outset both complexity and tension

167 in the biblical record. The epistles, which provide the best defense of penal substitution, are not necessarily a representative sample of early Christian evangelism. They’re letters written to churches or individual Christians and would more accurately be categori- zed as discipleship material. Meanwhile, the book of Acts—our best example of apostolic evangelism—makes almost no reference to substitution or sacrifice for sin. To be sure, we see the apostles evangelize with boldness, making arguments from sweeping Old Testament exegesis. But we don’t necessarily find them focusing on the cross. Instead, witness in Acts tends to emphasize the resurrection and future judgment for all who fail to repent. Of course, the death of Jesus does appear in Acts. But the ac- cent usually lands on the suffering of the innocent Messiah at the hands of lawless men (Acts 2:23; 3:14–15; 13:27–28), not the death of a righteous Savior in place of the wicked. We’re only given hints at PSA. Some may suggest that the exchange of Jesus for guilty Barabbas is an analogy to PSA (Acts 3:14). But that makes for a tenuous defense. A bit clearer reference might be the Ethiopian’s reading from Isaiah, followed by Philip’s explanation—which we assume included an exposition of the Lamb who bore our iniqui- ties (Acts 8:35; cf. Isa. 53:4–11). But we can only speculate. One more piece of evidence is the church’s understanding that Jesus’s death was God’s plan, which raises the question, “Why would God punish the guiltless?” (Acts 4:27–28). But Acts doesn’t provide penal substitution as an answer. What then are we to make of this tension? Paul says that Jesus’s death for sins was a priority in his preaching, but Luke’s record of apostolic witness doesn’t appear to stress a sin-substitute. At this point, it might be tempting for those committed to PSA to look elsewhere to bolster their perspective. But we must be careful. We can’t automatically appeal to epistolary literature to resolve this tension. Letters written to believers don’t necessarily represent the content of initial gospel proclamation. Whereas the apostles arti-

168 culate a theology of atonement in their writings, it doesn’t follow that all or even most of their evangelism comprised a thorough formulation of PSA. Two lessons emerge at this point, one hermeneutical and one practical. First, Luke doesn’t tell us everything. Acts doesn’t supply an exhaustive account of early evangelistic encounters. Further- more, Luke likely had his own theological emphases and practical purposes in writing. Much like the occasional nature of an epistle, and like other history, Acts is both interpretive and instructive. So we shouldn’t press the apparent under-representation too far, as if what Luke records is opposed to Paul’s self-described priority. Their perspectives can be complementary. Second—and here is a potential corrective—even though Je- sus’s death for sins truly is of first importance, it may not be the first thing we talk about in evangelism. While Paul does state that he endeavored to know nothing except Christ and him crucified (1 Cor. 2:2), we have good reason to understand such as hyper- bole. Paul’s own pattern of preaching, seen through Acts, clearly included a defense of Jesus as Messiah and King, reflections on God’s powerful creation and gracious providence, and declarations of Jesus’s resurrection and return in judgment. Paul’s evangelism didn’t always or only focus on Jesus as the substitute for sin. Interestingly, Paul didn’t even include a requirement (in Ro- mans, no less!) to believe that Jesus died for our sins in order to be saved (Rom. 10:9).

EXPLAINING AND PROVING THE CROSS In what sense, then, can we affirm Paul’s statement that Jesus’s death for sins truly is of first importance? And what role, if any, does explaining PSA have in our evangelism? To give an answer, we can consider two more incidents of Paul’s preaching from Acts which provide hints to his approach.

169 First, at the climax of his evangelistic sermon at Pisidian An- tioch, Paul announced that forgiveness of sins is now available through Jesus. He said that all who believe in him are justified (translated as “freed” in the ESV) from that which the law could not justify (Acts 13:38–39). Paul’s reasoning in those verses sounds strikingly similar to his argument in Romans 3:21–28, a passage significant for our understanding of PSA. In short, we can deduce that Paul articulated to his Antiochian audience a clear explanation of Jesus’s work on the cross. In bringing the good news that God was fulfilling in Jesus all that was promised (Acts 13:32–32), his message likely included how the new covenant hope of forgiveness was available through Jesus’s blood. He perhaps explained how those who were condemned by the law could now be justified apart from it, by the righteousness of God that comes through faith in Christ (Rom. 3:21–22). A second example of Paul’s method, and one perhaps clearer in relation to PSA, is found in his preaching at Thessalonica. There we’re told Paul’s custom was to enter the synagogue and reason “from the (OT) Scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead” (Acts 17:2–3). This Lukan summary echoes Paul’s own statement in 1 Corinthians 15:3–4. Paul’s characteristic message in the synagogue was to defend and describe the necessity of the cross from the OT. How did Paul prove that the Messiah must suffer? What OT texts did he employ in Thessalonica? Here, I think it’s appropriate to consult Paul’s epistles. Writing later to the same Thessalonians, he recalled how they had been delivered from the wrath to come because they received his gospel (1 Thes. 1:10). We know Paul understood the law as a curse to the lawbreaker. But Jesus took that curse for us on the tree (Gal. 3:10–13; cf. 1 Pet. 2:24). Paul viewed Jesus’s death as the fulfillment of the Passover sacrifice, bringing redemption (1 Cor. 5:7). Our sin-debt was canceled at his cross

170 (Col. 2:14). Paul taught that Jesus became sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21). Justification by God and deliverance from his wrath through the sin-bearing, debt-canceling sacrifice of Jesus is the heart of PSA. And we have good reason to believe this good news was the priority of Paul’s apostolic preaching, first by his own admission, but also in the summarized record of his gospel ministry throughout Greece, Macedonia, and Asia.

HOW WE CAN DO THIS If explaining and proving the cross was the priority for Paul’s gospel proclamation, how might we follow his example in our own witness? Here I would offer three proposals.

1. Emphasize Fulfillment First, our evangelism should, like Paul’s summary in 1 Co- rinthians 15, emphasize fulfillment. It’s extremely unhelpful to preach the gospel in a way that disconnects the cross from God’s promise and plan. If we merely tell people (even children) that “Jesus died for your sins,” it means almost nothing. We can’t simply preach Christ and him crucified as if the gospel exists in a vacuum. The death of Jesus only makes sense within the context and framework of OT expectations. There are many approaches to connect the cross to the OT. One way is by exploring how the first sin separated us from God, but how the gospel is a story of restoration through sacrifice. This happens progressively, first through prescribed animal sacrifices which provide temporary and limited access to God. But the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus brings us near, providing permanent reconciliation (1 Pet. 3:18; 2 Cor. 5:16-21). Taking this approach can help non-Christians see the purpose of penal substitution as relational and restorative (beyond courtroom forensics) whi-

171 le grounding it in the grand narrative of Scripture. The goal in this or any presentation, as Paul prioritized, is to present the good news of Jesus according to the Scriptures.

2. Demonstrate the Cross’s Necessity While the death of Jesus was necessary in accordance with OT prophecy (Acts 3:18), the NT emphasis is not on the cross’s mere inevitability. The death of Jesus was predetermined for a specific purpose. Also, when Paul explained and proved the death of Jesus, he wasn’t making an argument for the cross’s historicity. Instead, he demonstrated its necessity (Acts 13:27–33). Like Jesus before him, Paul established from the law and prophets the theological reasoning why Messiah must suffer (Luke 24:25–26). Jesus had to die because righteousness wouldn’t come through any other means (Gal. 1:21). In our evangelism, we must explain that it’s only through Jesus’s atoning death on the cross as a substitute sacrifice that we are forgiven, reconciled to God, and delivered from the present evil age (Gal. 1:4). This is particularly important to emphasize when people don’t feel the evil of their own sin against God. In Western cultures where moral relativism reigns, or in Eastern cultures where dynamics of honor and shame prevail, evangelists should carefully expose from Scripture the need for the cross because of our guilt and condemnation. If people don’t have categories for judgment or righteousness, our response should not be to ignore such biblical concepts. The very idea of “explaining and proving the cross” assumes that many of our hearers will not intuitively understand its meaning. We must show them why the death of Jesus was needed: because we have dishonored and disobeyed our Creator.

3. Remember the Resurrection Sometimes those of us who would emphasize PSA in evangelism forget the significance of the resurrection. In our attempts to

172 tell others about Christ’s work in our stead (PSA), we overlook his place as our representative head. As we explain the unique and exclusive nature of Jesus’s death for us (Rom. 5:8), we miss the inclusiveness of our death and resurrection with him (Rom. 6:8). So we should speak both of Christ’s substitution and his representation in our evangelism. But that doesn’t mean that the resurrection has nothing to do with PSA. Since Jesus was condemned in our place, for him to remain in the grave would spell our demise: we’d be left in our sins. But the good news is that Christ has been raised for our justification (Rom. 4:25). His resurrection is not the icing on the cake, but a primary ingredient within the gospel. When he was vindicated on the third day, we were as well. According to the apostles, the resurrection of Jesus is proof of his innocence and our justification. It’s also confirmation that God will judge the world. As such, the resurrection is both the basis of our right standing with God and the impetus for sinners to repent. So we must remember the resurrection in our evangelism, explaining and proving it as integral—of first importance—to the good news of Jesus for all who will believe.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Elliot Clark lived in Central Asia, where he served as a cross-cultural church planter along with his wife and children. He is currently working to train local church leaders overseas with Trai- ning Leaders International. He is also the author of Evangelism as Exiles: Life on Mission as Strangers in Our Land (TGC).

173 How Charles Finney (and other Overly Emotional Preachers) Made It Difficult to Preach the Gospel

Johnny Lithell

iberal charismatics.” That’s how my friend described the teenagers in his “L church’s youth group. As he described them, these you- ths would outstretch their arms during corporate worship, and sing at the top of their lungs about their longing for God. At the same time, they would reject large portions of the Bible and in- dulge in sinful sexual relationships—never even noticing the intellectual discrepancy. They’re charismatics, he said, because they want to experience the Spirit’s presence. They’re liberal because they’d never acknowledge the authority or sufficiency of the Bible. They believe in God, just not the God of Scripture.

174 As I heard my friend describe his youth group, I was reminded of my own ministry in secular Sweden. I don’t minister to teenagers but to urban professionals and academics. And yet, like these youth, many Swedish churchgoers adhere to a mixture of uncons- cious liberal theology and emotionalism. LIBERALISM AND EMOTIONALISM: WHERE DID THEY COME FROM? The roots of this strange mixture of ideas can be traced back to the influence of the American revivalist Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875), whose “new measures” for creating revivals continue to shape Swedish Christianity. Breaking from his forerunners who considered revivals, in the words of Jonathan Edwards, “a surprising work of God,” Finney thought of revivals as entirely man-made.

A revival is not a miracle, nor dependent on a miracle, in any sense. It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means—as much so as any other effect produced by the application of means.27

How, according to Finney, can we engineer a revival? First, we need good marketing. Second, we need protracted meetings to maximize the psychological pressure on sinners to make decisions for Christ. Third, we should press the individual sinner and address him directly from the pulpit, all in a meticulously directed drama. We should pressure the individual and invite him to a smaller decision, namely to come forward to the “anxious bench,” and continue to urge him there to make his final decision for Christ. Finally, we should create an emotionally charged atmosphere. In Finney’s words, “The evangelist must produce exci- tements sufficient to induce sinners to repentance.”28

27 Charles Finney, Charles Finney’s Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1976), 180. 28 Finney’s Lectures on Revival, second ed. (N.Y., 1835), 184–204.

175 This revivalist mentality of 1830s New England may not look identical in 2019 Sweden, but it still shapes virtually all corporate worship in Sweden. It addresses the individual and presses for personal decisions. In Sweden, the individual is not invited to repent of his sins, but to light a candle or to come forward to be served by a personal intercessor. Swedes evaluate whether they had a “good” service by the amount of response they see in the room and whether there was a vibrant emotional atmosphere. While it may seem like these services are entirely devoid of theology, they aren’t. Just as with Finney, our ministry practices flow out of our theological convictions. Finney’s near Pelagian theology enabled him to devise his “new measures,” and much of the same theology is still at play in Swedish Christianity. So what’s the theology behind these “new measures”? Finney denied the teaching of a human, sinful nature. He declared the notion of original sin to be “anti-scriptural and nonsensical dog- m a .” 29 Similarly, he rejects the doctrine of supernatural regeneration. He didn’t deny that the Holy Spirit exerts some moral influence on the believer, but “the actual turning . . . is the sinner’s own act.”30 He doesn’t even seem to try to conceal his Pelagia- nism—the most frequently condemned heresy of all time—which is evident in the mere title of his most famous sermon, “Sinners Bound To Change Their Own Hearts.” The gospel he preached was essentially a different gospel from his forerunners. He vehemently denied the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement. Explaining his doctrine of atonement, Finney says, “If [Christ] had obeyed the law as our substitute, then why should our own return to personal obedience be insisted upon as a sine qua non of our salvation?”31 In other words, since our personal obedience is a sine qua non—an indispensable condition—of our salvation, Christ couldn’t have obeyed the law 29 Finney, Systematic Theology, 179. 30 Cited in B. B. Warfield, Perfectionism (Philipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed), 176. 31 Finney, Systematic Theology, 206.

176 as our substitute. Instead, Finney says, the death of Christ “would present to creatures the highest possible motives to virtue. Exam- ple is the highest moral influence that can be exerted. . . . If the benevolence manifested in the atonement does not subdue the selfishness of sinners, their case is hopeless.”32 Where does Finney’s gospel lead? Take away the doctrines of human depravity, of supernatural regeneration, of substitutionary atonement, and instead address the individual in an emotionally charged atmosphere and call for unbiblical responses to a false gospel—well, you get a strange mixture of liberal theology and emotionalism.

PREACHING PENAL SUBSTITUTION IN A SECULAR CULTURE The doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement isn’t the only doctrine that Swedes find controversial in my preaching, but it is the most common one. I can’t say I blame my critics. I don’t think most of them have ever heard a Swedish pastor unapologetically expound God’s wrath and the Son’s willing sacrifice in our place. So, how can a church in a secular setting work toward a culture where discussing God’s wrath and substitutionary atonement isn’t frowned upon but celebrated? There are no quick fixes or magic pills. That said, I’d like to propose three practices that will prove helpful in all of ministry.

1. Preach expositionally. Don’t preach topically—just don’t. Week after week, open the Bible, preach through books of the Bible, verse by verse. Preach plainly. Love the Bible and submit to it. Let the congregation fall in love with the Bible rather than with you as a preacher. Let them get a sense of the vast variety of texts and

32 Ibid., 209.

177 tones of God’s transforming Word. Let your plain, expository preaching be a mark of your faithful ministry.

2. Preach the gospel. Take every opportunity to teach theology proper—the attributes and character of God. Teach your people about the God who is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. Teach about the state of man, that all mankind through the Fall lost communion with God. Teach that we’re under his wrath and curse, and so made liable to all miseries in this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell forever. And teach the glorious truths about how God saves sinners—how he, for our sake, made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. It doesn’t matter how secular or difficult your context is; these truths should never be toned down or abbrevia- ted, but exulted in and celebrated! 3. Kill individualism. Tone down emotionalism—but don’t ignore emotions. You don’t need to create “movement” in the room. Let worship be corporate, which is easier said than done, since it may require a complete paradigm shift. Remind your people that they’re there to worship God together; they’re not individuals who simply happen to be in the same room. Consider removing special music and altar calls that highlight individual responses. Get back to fundamental, biblical worship, where you read the Bible together, sing the Bible together, preach the Bible, pray the Bible, and see the Bible portrayed in baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Johnny Lithell is the pastor of Parkway Church in Gothenburg, Sweden.

178 Ten Atonement Songs You Should Consider Singing

Bob Kauflin

ver the years, I’ve realized that not all songs about the cross are created equal. Some use the word “cross” wi- Othout explaining what it means. Others see the cross merely as a selfless act of love for our encouragement. Others give voice to an appropriate response of devotion (e.g., Isaac Watts’ “When I Survey”). Some come close to articulating what Jesus accomplished at the cross while leaving out some of the details. But the power of the cross is in the details. That’s why I’m constantly on the lookout for songs that clearly, beautifully, faithfully, and compellingly point us to what actually took place on a hill called Calvary. Jesus, the perfect Son of God, bore our sins in his body on the tree to endure the wrath of God for us. Why? So that we might be forgiven, reconciled to God, live joyfully for God’s glory, and spend eternity with him (Col. 1:13–14; 1 Pet. 2:24; Col. 3:17; Rev. 5:9–10). That reality is a source of endless beauty, wonder, worship, and joy.

179 You probably already sing songs that do just what I’ve been describing. Songs like “Before the Throne of God Above,” “And Can It Be,” “In Christ Alone,” “Man of Sorrows,” “It Is Well,” “The Power of the Cross,” and many more. Here are ten more for you to consider that you might not know about or haven’t sung yet. I’ve included some lines from each song and intentionally drawn from a variety of eras and styles.

1. AT THE CROSS OF JESUS (JOHN EDDISON/RICHARD SIMPKIN) A modern, five-verse UK hymn with a simple melody. “Even though I be chief of all the sinners, there is hope for me.” “Though my sins condemn me, Jesus died instead.” “Let your love possess me, so that all may see what your death accomplished on the cross for m e .”

2. HIS ROBES FOR MINE (CHRIS ANDERSON/ GREG HABEGGER) Another recent, four-verse hymn with a chorus. This is well known in some circles, but I led it for the first time last year. “I cling to Christ, and marvel at the cost, Jesus forsaken, God estranged from God.” “What cause have I to dread? God’s daunting law Christ mastered in my stead.” One of the few hymns that manages to get both “vicarious” and “propitiation” in one song.

3. JERUSALEM (JONNY ROBINSON, RICH THOMPSON, TIARNE KLEYN) A beautiful hymn from the Australian based group CityAlight, that takes us to the day Jesus died. “Dust that formed the watching crowds, takes the blood of Jesus.” “And he stood before the wrath of God, shiel- ding sinners with his blood.”

180 4. O LORD, MY ROCK AND MY REDEEMER (NATE STIFF) A modern hymn that expresses the satisfaction and security that come from knowing our sins have been paid for. “My guilt and cross laid on your shoulders, in my place, You suffered bled and died.” “You rose, the grave and death are conquered, You broke my bonds of sin and shame.”

5. MEDIATOR (CAM HUXFORD) An upbeat indie rock song that expounds on 1 Timothy 2:5. “He takes our place and stands in front of God on high, he speaks on our behalf since we don’t have the right.” “There is only one God, there is only one mediator, standing between God and man, he’s the only way to salvation.”

6. MY SAVIOUR LEFT HIS THRONE ABOVE (ZAC HICKS/ JULIE ANNE VARGAS) A modern hymn in 3/4 that reminds us of what Jesus did, felt, and earned for us through his life, death, and resurrection. “He felt the storms of human pain.” “He kept his Father’s every word; the Law he followed perfectly; So all God’s pleasure he secured, all this and more he earned for me.” “Because he died once for all time, and bore the curse of death and hell, final forgiveness here is mine, so it is finished, all is well.”

7. NOW WHY THIS FEAR (DOUG PLANK/AUGUSTUS TOPLADY) A modern adaptation of Augustus Toplady’s hymn, “From Whence This Fear and Unbelief.” “Will the righteous Judge of men condemn me for that debt of sin now canceled at the cross?” “Complete atonement You have made, and by Your death have fully paid the debt

181 Your people owed.” “The merits of your great high priest have bought your liberty.”

8. THE PASSION (BROOKE LIGERTWOOD/SCOTT LIGERTWOOD/CHRIS DAVENPORT) Like “Man of Sorrows,” this is another Hillsong offering that arti- culates penal substitution clearly and faithfully. “For Jesus’ blood that sets us free means death to death and life for me.” “The Inno- cent judged guilty, while the guilty one walks free, death would be His portion, and our portion liberty.”

9. UPON A LIFE I HAVE NOT LIVED (HORATIUS BONAR/ KEVIN TWIT) An indie song from Indelible Grace that emphasizes how the cross eliminates any boasting in ourselves. “Upon a life I have not lived, upon a death I did not die, another’s life, another’s death I stake my whole eternity.” “O Jesus, Son of God, I build on what Thy cross has done for me, There both my life and death I read, my guilt, my pardon there I see.”

10. YET NOT I BUT THROUGH CHRIST IN ME (JONNY ROBINSON, RICH THOMPSON, MICHAEL FARREN) Another CityAlight addition to modern hymnody that I hope is being sung for a long time. “No fate I dread, I know I am forgiven, the future sure, the price it has been paid, for Jesus bled and suffered for my pardon and He was raised to overthrow the grave.”

While substitutionary atonement isn’t the only thing God wants us to sing about, it’s why we can sing to God at all, and the greatest reason we have to sing. And for those reasons, we will

182 never have enough songs to extol the glory of the Lamb who was slain to purchase our salvation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Bob Kauflin is the director of Sovereign Grace Music and one of the pastors of Sovereign Grace Church of Louisville.

183 DON’T ASSUME IT OR YOU’LL LOSE IT

Conrad Mbewe

he longer I pastor, the more I’m convinced that pastors should regularly preach the unsearchable riches of Christ Tnot only for the salvation of the lost but also for the believers’ growth in grace. But sadly, when dealing with the Savior’s work in saving us from sin, we preachers so often say very little. Because of this, something frightening happens over time: those who listen to us fill in their own meanings to the common words “Jesus died on the cross”—and those meanings can be far from what the Bible actually teaches concerning the death of Christ on the cross. Here’s an example. In Africa, where the blood of birds and animals is used as a charm of protection from witchcraft, it’s become popular, even among Christians, to see a bumper sticker that declares “Protected by the blood of Jesus.” Pulpits are to blame for this serious confusion. When the death of Christ is merely mentioned as part of the final appeal in sermons, too much is being assumed. I am amazed at how many people hear, “Jesus died because of our sins,” and understand it to mean that he died to merely show us how bad our sins are.

184 I am equally shocked that many Christians, upon being asked where they would go if they died immediately after sinning, think they would go to hell. Is this not due to failing to understand what really took place when Jesus died? It is our responsibility as preachers to regularly explain the subject of penal substitutionary atonement so that those who listen to us can come to a fuller understanding of what really took place on the cross when the Son of God took our place and paid our debt in full. What we emphasize in a sermon will often depend on our text. Thus, there will be sufficient variety as we proclaim the gospel. And yet, we must avoid merely mentioning words like “blood,” “death,” and “cross” without ever unpacking their meaning. I can think of three truths about the atonement that our preaching must elaborate on so that our listeners can understand in this central act of our salvation. What are those three truths? 1. Jesus suffered the penalty of sin. From the very beginning of history, God had told Adam that he would die if he ate the for- bidden fruit (Gen. 2:17). The wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23). That’s precisely the price that Jesus paid when he died on the cross. 2. Jesus suffered as our substitute. Because Jesus was born sinless and lived a sinless life, death had no claim on him. His death was in our place the same way that animal sacrifices were made to appease God’s wrath across history (2 Cor. 5:21). 3. Jesus satisfied God in his suffering. Whereas animal sacrifices weren’t sufficient to atone for human sin, the substitutionary death of the Son of God was more than sufficient. The righteous God is totally satisfied, and as evidence, he raised Jes- us from the dead. It’s beyond the scope of this article for me to open up these points. What I want to say is that these three truths about the penal substitutionary atonement should not be assumed. We must teach them line-upon-line and precept-upon-precept.

185 There’s a perception in the minds of many preachers that the depth of teaching they got on the atonement during their Bible college days is only for them as preachers, that it would be too deep for the ordinary Christian in the pew. This perception is entirely false. It’s also why, over time and across generations, churches lose the truth. The pastor should ensure that in his regular ministry of ex- pounding God’s Word he is plumbing the depths of the truths he encounters in the sacred text. A tree with shallow roots will easily be uprooted when howling winds blow. But the ones with deep roots will remain standing. In the same way, individuals with a shallow understanding of Christ’s work on the cross are easily unsettled by life’s trials. They also are easily misled by popular false teachings. This happens because false teachers often use scriptural words but fill them with wrong meanings and interpretations. Only well-taught minds will be able to pick that up and reject the error. Where much ground has been lost, pastors should consider special Bible studies and seminars on this vital subject. Per- haps host question-and-answer sessions that will equip your people. The materials taught can be uploaded somewhere, printed, and disseminated throughout the congregation. Brothers, my point is a simple one: let’s not assume that our people know the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement. Let’s teach it regularly in all its depth as we expound the Scrip- tures. We must not allow the generation growing up under our ministry to lose such a glorious foundation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Conrad Mbewe is the pastor of Kabwata Baptist Church in Lu- saka, Zambia.

186 On the Inexhaustible Riches of Preaching Christ and Him Crucified

Jeremy Walker

he atonement—Christ’s blood shed as the ransom for sinners—is the very core of the gospel. There is no good Tnews without Christ’s sacrifice, for without the shedding of blood there can be no forgiveness of sins. To preach the cross means to preach penal substitutionary atonement. When a preacher says, “I am a gospel man!” he means—he ought to mean— “I am a preacher of the cross of Christ!” But what does that mean? What did Paul have in mind when he told the Corinthians that he “determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2)? Does it mean that we incessantly preach narrow and shallow “Calvary sermons,” mindlessly rehearsing basic phrases and tropes?

187 By no means! Of course, first and foremost, it does require that we preach a crucified Christ as the sole object of saving faith. The penal substitutionary atonement of Christ is our good news. When pushing them back to the very essence of salvation, Paul asked the Galatians, “Who has bewitched you that you should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed among you as crucified?” (Gal 3:1). Such preaching means sweetly, intelligently, engagingly, inventively, attractively, persistently, stubbornly, holding up the wonders of redeeming love in the death of the Son. It means preaching from both the Old and New Testaments—from the types and shadows, and from the glorious fulfilment. It means pressing Christ’s claims upon needy souls. But preaching the cross does not end there. The great themes and topics of Scripture are to be heralded on a regular basis. In doing this, we must always follow the road that brings us back to our Savior. We must display truth so that Christ is seen at the heart. Preaching Christ is not merely tacking him on as an addendum to our messages, or as part of a random gospel appeal. Jesus is not just a name to be repeated time after time. Rather, we are to see all the truths we expound as connected to our Lord. Accor- ding to Alexander MacLaren, Preaching Christ does not exclude any theme, but prescribes the bearing and purpose of all; and the widest compass and richest variety are not only possible, but obligatory for him who would in any worthy sense take this for the motto of his ministry, “I determine not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and him crucified.”33 And this is what we must pursue both in more directly evangelistic preaching and what we might call more pastoral ministry. The apostles brought every issue of doctrine and practice, every

33 Alexander MacLaren, The Expositor’s Bible: Volume 6 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1956), 224.

188 question of faith and life, back to Christ and him crucified, and resolved it at the foot of the cross. Were there divisions in the church? Between nationalities? Be- tween factions? Between individuals? Was there creeping legalism? Were libertarianism and antinomianism asserting themselves? Were there false teachers preaching any of a range of heresies? Were there sad and doubting Christians? Did believers need comfort or exhortation? The right response to any and all of these dangers and difficulties was and always is the same: Jesus. Read over the epistles through this lens, and see how the cross is the answer to division between Jew and Gentile, to legalism in Galatia, to paganism in Ephesus, to mysticism and syncretism in Colossae. It deals with antagonism between Philemon and Onesi- mus, with forgiveness between saints in Ephesus, with selfishness in Philippi. Christ is not only the entrance into the kingdom, He is its abiding life-principle. His penal substitutionary atonement not only brings sinners into the way, it keeps them and helps them on the way. There is nothing in the Christian life that is divorced from the crucifed Christ. He is the golden hub of the gospel wheel, and the whole is only true and balanced insofar as he is kept at its center. Christ in his death and resurrection is the beating heart of the gospel. So preach penal substitutionary atonement in all its range and richness. Preach the cross. Explain it and apply it. Preach Christ and him crucified, for the abiding and abounding life of every soul.34

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jeremy Walker is the pastor of Maidenbower Baptist Church since 2003. 34 Elements of this article are adapted from ‘The subject of Paul’s ministry,’ chapter 6 in Rob Ventura and Jeremy Walker, A Portrait of Paul: Identifying a True Minister of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2010).

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