The Enduring Appeal of the Penal Substitionary Understanding of the Atonement: For some years the penal substitionary understanding of the atonement has been very hotly contested. From both within and without evangelicalism, sharp questions, and in some cases strident objections, has been raised against the common Evangelical/Protestant understanding of the atonement: That Christ on the cross suffered the punishment of our sins to satisfy the justice of God and to merit for us the forgiveness of sins that we maybe spared the divine punishment. The objections has been many and various, some consists of the usual caricatures of a vengeful, vindictive deity being too “legalistic” or whatever, others involve arguments about church history, tradition or biblical exegesis. Evangelical and Protestant church historians and biblical exegetes has already provided much in depth analysis and judicious examination on the historical record as well as the biblical exegesis such as to provide sufficient grounds to be wary of simplistic historical narratives of how penal substitution was the sole invention of those nasty Protestant reformers. (A very good test of those who buy into the simplistic narrative without having read the actual sources is if a person blames Anselm for the penal substitionary understanding of the atonement. That is normally a very reliable sign for the fact that he has never actually read Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo for himself.) Despite the legion of objections to the penal substitionary understanding of the atonement, this doctrine, or theory, has weathered the storms of objection undisturbed and, if anything, it is more vigorously asserted than ever. It continues to both inspire and infuriate, to be both the preaching of comfort as the cornerstone of the Gospel, and the lie of a ghoulish god and the archetypal heresy of the Reformers or Latin Christendom. But what accounts for the enduring appeal of the penal substitionary account of the atonement? Why do millions of Evangelicals and Protestants continue to cling onto it, sing it, praise it and confess it? All the accusations of legalism or a vengeful deity cannot however remove the voice of our conscience which accuses us of our sins and judges us. Our honest and uncloaked conscience passes its sentence against us for our sins, it not only points out our flaws but it also reveals our innate worthlessness, the meanness and frivolity of our “sad sad” lives, and the smallness of our accomplishments (or good works!). This judgement is not merely experienced as a rarefied third person objective “legal sentence” but as something which we live in and experience daily, it weighs upon us, it depresses us, and the course of our lives would throw up daily reminders of its judgement. It is the humiliation we feel when we see our peers get ahead of us in life or who has done grand deeds, it is shame we feel when someone else discusses a sin which we have been harbouring in secret, all these boils down to the divine sentence pronounced long ago in the Garden, that we shall die and return to dust, and that in the end, we are truly nothing with utterly worthless lives which no fig leaf can cover. So, it is not about some accounting book in the heavens which God needed to balance, it is about a real judgement which we experience in this spatio-temporal world. Feeling the voice of this judgement, we wonder if God would want to be associated with worthless and corrupt people like us, even less desire to save us from our inevitable progress towards nothingness. One can of course attempt to deny the voice of this judgement by repeated attempts at self-delusion of verbally “affirming our worth. Yet those are just mere words without a basis in reality. We say we can do it, we can be better, we are worth it; we are shown examples everyday on Facebook or the social media of people who have struggled out of their meanness into success. Yet out of the few who, by twist of Fate, do succeed, how many other thousands and hundreds of thousands lie forgotten by time? A recent article showed that nine out of ten start-ups fail. But what you will see is the one in ten who succeeds, the rare lucky ones. Such verbal affirmations have no basis in reality for most of us and it is merely a hope without foundation, it expresses not a truth but a wish, a wish which fulfilment is subject to forces beyond our control. What does penal substitution say? It simply does not deny the facts. The Son of God comes to us as we actually are: vicious, corrupt and worthless losers, under the sentence of God’s wrath, and he dwells with us and among us. He bore the very same judgement which continues to sound in our hearts and our minds. He suffered and went through with us our inevitable progress towards death and nothingness. He endured the shame which we feel, the mockery which we hear, and he carried the sorrows and echoes of the first despair at Eden in his soul until “It is finished” and lead to its inevitable conclusion, death. In that sense, He did bear the punishment and judgement of our sins: death and the return to dust of our fragile, sad and worthless lives. This is the true wages of sin, death and utter nothingness. Yet of course we know that this is not the end of the story. From the corpse of our Saviour’s body awakens a life renewed. Death does not have the final say nor does it conclude our lives. Out of our misdeeds, our vices which hastens the inevitable wasting away of our life, there arises a new life. The Word has overcome the voice of judgement, out of the old corrupted creation passing and fading away into dust comes a new life a new creation. Christ having suffered the same judgement which we suffer, the same accusation which we hear, and the same condemnation which we feel, has overcome it by rising again. Christ is not ashamed of us, having carried our judgement, and he returns from the grave and sentence of our sins to continue to love us and to be with us; he eats meals with us and continues to discourse with us, shrugging off the old voice of judgement which begins to fade and recede into the past, destined to be forgotten. A new life and hope is continuously being created in the present in the presence of Gods love in Jesus Christ, overcoming the tangled sins and mistakes of the past, and leading to a future which no eye has seen and no heart has imagined what God has prepared for the elect. Penal Substitution simply says that the Son of God bore the punishment and judgement of our sin, which is death, worthlessness and nothingness, by taking our place as man that we need not remain in this punishment and be condemned to the perpetual night of death but be raised with him unto newness of perpetual life. It is this fundamental conviction, consciously or unconsciously grasped, that Christ did truly “go through” or suffer our judgement and has overcome it by his resurrection, which drives the Evangelical to cling tenaciously to the doctrine. Personally I have meandered a bit about the doctrine of penal substitution, but I guess in my latitudinarian phase, I’m starting to learn to be sympathetic as to what is good and true in every theological system and doctrine, and I think that this is an insight which the church truly cannot do without as long as sin and death remains a reality in this world.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 09:32:41 +0000
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