BAD THEOLOGY 8: PENAL SUBSTITUTIONARY ATONEMENT

Moving to a Conclusion

Some time ago, I promised as a conclusion to my Bad Theology series to address what is perhaps a core doctrine in the evangelical theology toolkit: penal substitutionary atonement (PSA). PSA is the view that Jesus suffered and died to satisfy the wrath of God directed toward us and our sins. We are saved from the wrath of God and eternal punishment by believing in Jesus.

PSA represents more than just a theological formula; it represents an attitude, a way of approaching God and life. A way of approaching politics. A way of approaching justice. The assumptions of PSA inform evangelicalism at every level, and because evangelicalism has come to dominate our national life, the underlying assumptions of PSA have come to dominate our political life. The influence of PSA is everywhere.

It purports to be gospel—good news. Asked what’s the good news in the good news, you are likely to get, not just in evangelical churches, but especially there, a version of PSA. We escape eternal death by believing in Jesus. It’s what I was taught at every level in my theological education, and very likely, so were you. It’s what was preached at Billy Graham revivals. It’s what lies behind the Four Spiritual Laws. It’s what many people think they read when they read the Bible.

The Moving Parts of PSA

PSA is a particular version of what has come, in theological circles, to be called an “atonement theory.” The title, “penal substitutionary atonement,” gets at the most important points. 

The first word in the formula, “penal,” from Latin poena, “pain, penalty,” presents the gospel as juridical: a legal decision made in the divine court. Through the sin of Adam, our covenant representative, humans incur the wrath of God. As a result, we deserve punishment, the horrors of hell. Absent some other way to pay the penalty, God, as a matter of fact, cannot do otherwise. Justice requires it. 

This theory of atonement is also “substitutionary.” Because we cannot pay the penalty, God sends God’s own son to pay it for us. Jesus steps in where we cannot. He pays the penalty on the cross.

I note here without developing the thought that this second claim of PSA is a bit odd for at least two reasons. One is that the idea that someone can step in for the guilt of someone else seems strange. It’s true that occasionally a person will give up their life for someone else. I think about those who stepped in front of Nazi firing squads, allowing others to escape death. To do so was heroic. But what of the commander of the firing squad? To allow an innocent person to be executed or, rather, to require that someone die in those circumstances is on any account wrong. And in the PSA analogy, we would seem to be putting God in the place of the commander of the firing squad: someone must die; it doesn’t matter whom.

Second, there is a matter of proportionality. This goes in two directions. First, for God to require eternal punishment for temporal sins seems entirely out of proportion. Is it just for God to require hell for the sins of a child who dies young? Or a person who lives an exemplary life apart from the faith? But it is also out of proportion in the other direction. For the sufferings of Christ, terrible as they were, to balance the suffering of the world seems, well, not entirely adequate. Perhaps this is the reason that Christians seem intent on Good Friday of focusing on how much Jesus suffered.

I raise these questions not to answer them but to point out that the “substitutionary” part of PSA is a more difficult concept than many Christians seem to think. I will return to these questions in subsequent posts.

Finally, PSA purports to be a way to understand “atonement”: penal substitutionary atonement. It’s here that we come to another complication. Let me lay it out briefly.

At-one-ment

“Atonement” is not a biblical word. Our word “atonement” was introduced into English in the course of translating the Bible. William Tyndale, building on the work of John Wycliffe, created (or used; he may have borrowed it) a new word: “at-one-ment” or, as we have it, “atonement.” 

Tyndale used this new word in the New Testament to translate the Greek katallassō, “reconcile,” in the 2 Corinthians 5:18-20. “To make one,” captures well the idea of reconciliation. Tyndale translates the last part of 2 Corinthians 5:20 : “So praye we you in Christes stede that ye be atone with God.” You could read this straightforwardly in modern English and capture Tyndale’s (and Paul’s) meaning: “So we urger you on Christ’s behalf to be one with God.” Nice.

But Tyndale also used his new word for Hebrew kipper, a verb used often in the Old Testament laws on sacrifice. This, if I be permitted a cross-language pun, is a quite another kettle of fish. Not that Tyndale had it wrong, but because of the way the Old Testament sacrificial system came to be understood later, “atone” began to take on the meanings that we now associate with it: “make amends, make reparation, repay.” When we say that someone is trying to atone for their sins, we have in mind that they are trying to balance the scales, to do something that will make up for whatever damage they may have done. 

This is not in fact what kipper means in the Hebrew text. It’s based on assumptions in the late 17^th century and later in Western theology about the meaning of sacrifices in ancient Israel. They assumed that the sacrificial system was essentially substitutionary: the poor lamb died instead of the person who offered it, thus in the modern understanding of “atonement,” making amends.

Again, this is not correct, as we shall see in the next post, but once “atone” came to mean “make amends” in the Old Testament, that meaning was imported into the New Testament. In this roundabout way, an idea about atonement—what we call PSA—came to live in our reading of the New Testament. It got there not from the Greek but indirectly from the way the Greek was read in the light of the theological assumptions of a later day. (On this, see Andrew Remington Rillera, Lamb of the Free: Recovering the Varied Sacrificial Understandings of Jesus’s Death. Cascade Books, 2024; in the next post I’ll have much more to say about Rillera’s work.)

The Drift of Things

But all of that is to get ahead of ourselves. Go back to the question I posed above: what is the good news in the good news (the gospel)? Or, to put it another way, what’s the Christian faith about anyway? 

The answer to those questions—the central questions of the faith—are being negotiated every week in churches everywhere. They are being negotiated in weekly sermons, in the liturgy (or the lack of a set liturgy), in the music, in the prayers, in the everyday life of everyday Christians. They are mostly not decided at synods and general assemblies but in thousands of small interpretative decisions everyday. And so the answer to what the faith means tends over time to drift.

This is one of the reasons we need scripture, the apostolic witness. We need scripture, as the Reformers reminded the church, in order to retrieve the essence of the faith from whatever it has drifted into lately. What I hope to do in this series of posts to point to some ways in which the church has drifted and, on the basis of scripture, to suggest a course correction.

One of the most important ways the church has drifted from its original course is in how it has come to understand what God is doing in the cross of Jesus Christ and, consequently, in our own lives. The prevalent understanding of this, what we know as penal substitutionary atonement (PSA), has effectively drifted the Christian faith from emphasis on this life to an emphasis on the next life and from an active participation in the way and work of Jesus Christ to a passive acceptance of what Jesus has done for us. The resultant gospel, the PSA gospel, no longer resembles the faith we find in Jesus and Paul.

So for the next three posts (I hope), I will address penal substitutionary atonement, suggesting three ways that PSA gets the gospel wrong:

1. PSA gets the Old Testament sacrificial system wrong. The key notion of PSA, that God requires blood for forgiveness, is derived from an erroneous reading of the sacrificial system in the Old Testament. For this post I will review the argument of King’s University (Edmonton) Professor Andrew Rillera in his 2024 book, Lamb of Free. Rillera, in great detail, argues that the sacrificial system is never substitutionary and not about death. It’s a view of sacrifice in the Old Testament that is compelling and opposed to the assumptions made by the advocates of PSA.

• PSA gets the gospel wrong. Much of this has to do with how we should read Paul. PSA reads Paul in terms of forensic justification: God declares us legally (though not actually) righteous on the basis of what Jesus did on the cross. It’s transactional. But this reading of Paul has been challenged in recent years by many scholars. Paul seems not so much to be concerned about forensic justification as about participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus. What has been presented as justification creates passive Christian; participation invites us into an active and engaged Christianity.

• PSA gets God wrong. The Bible is replete with references to the justice of God, but the God who meets us in penal substitutionary atonement is neither just nor loving. If the PSA God is just, it is a harsh justice. And if your god is neither just nor loving, it’s likely you will not be either. 

I will try to stay on schedule with these posts. I regard this work as crucial if we are to live the gospel faith in these despotic and desperate times. If we are to stand as the followers of Jesus in these times, we need to discover the gospel anew.

Clay