Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA)

Last week in this blog I began a discussion of penal substitutionary atonement, a teaching so much at the heart of evangelical theological thinking that it is often presented simply as The Gospel—The Good News.

So what is the PSA gospel? To answer that question, PSA tells a story. The story is simple and familiar to anyone who grew up in an evangelical church, although if you step back from it just a little bit, the story will at every turn appear strange and dubious—fairytalelike. 

The story begins with the Garden of Eden where the first humans were given the chance to prove themselves to God, but, alas, they failed. They ate the fruit they were commanded not to eat, and thus—so goes the story—God’s honor (Anselm) or God’s justice (most PSA advocates) was impugned, and this God cannot allow. For their actions God requires punishment—the “penal” in penal substitutionary atonement (PSA). In most versions of PSA, the punishment God metes out is eternal conscious pain, the evangelical concept of hell. But God has provided a solution. He sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to bear the pain and suffering in our stead—the “substitutionary” part of penal substitutionary atonement. In this way, the justice of God is “satisfied”—atoned for. 

More sophisticated presentations of PSA include other claims and complications, but the core story remains simple. At the heart of it is an idea about justice. In PSA, justice is a law of the universe, and not just the universe we can observe and study, but everything that exists, including, notably, God. God cannot escape God’s own justice. Thus, God cannot just forgive Adam and Eve for what appears to be a minor infraction, eating from a tree that they were forbidden to eat from, the sort of infraction every parent must forgive a thousand times before their child reaches puberty. And God must punish not only Adam and Eve but their children all the way down to us. This ghastly justice must be served, and thus Jesus must suffer and die, and those who fail to believe in Jesus for whatever reason (like, for example, never having heard of it) must suffer eternally in hell.

This harsh justice lies at the heart of evangelical theology, including the Calvinism with which many of us grew up. If you believe in this harsh and retributive justice, you will tend to build your view of the world in its image. In his preface to Andrew Rillera’s Lamb of Free, Douglas A. Campbell says of PSA:

It follows [from PSA] that the heart of the gospel is a political and retributive God and arrangement—and hence that all politics should be fundamentally retributive as well. God, we might say, is a God who is wholly committed to law and order, to the appropriate coercive order, and ultimately to the correctness of the death penalty, and this says the most important thing about who he is. Righteous violence defines him, as that is deployed in support of laws. This model of the gospel then, underwrites political authoritarianism and God is essentially a dictator. He is a fair dictator, but a dictator nonetheless, who wields the sword appropriately. (19)

Old Testament Sacrifice and the Case for PSA

I’ll return to this line of thinking about justice and about God in the final post in this series on PSA, but those who support PSA may at this point be inclined to say, “So what?” What we think about PSA doesn’t really matter; it’s what the scriptures teach. If you believe the Bible, you believe PSA. In 2022 the synod of the Christian Reformed Church—the synod that began the Abide takeover of the CRC—said just that. Before turning disastrously to sexuality, they took up PSA. The sequence was not accidental. The harsh justice that the synod has since meted out to those who differ with majority on sexuality is rooted in the theology that lies behind PSA. While the synod acknowledged that there were other ways to view atonement, they claimed that “The Scriptures and confessional standards make clear the substitutionary nature of Jesus Christ’s work,” and they added, “To deny penal substitutionary atonement is to take away from the glory of our Savior” (Acts of Synod 2022:897). 

I was a reporter at Synod 2022 and reported on the PSA debate. What is not quite clear from the official record is how the delegates seemed to view PSA. Theologians from as long as there has been theology have viewed statements about God as analogical. What we have are our human languages and our perception of the world in which we live. We use these to speak by analogy of what we cannot otherwise know. No one can see directly into the divine world. We speak of it guardedly as a mystery. But not these synod delegates. They seemed to regard PSA simply as the way things are, not only on earth but in heaven. There was a distressing lack of humility in the debate. 

But however you understand PSA, whether as a metaphor for God’s grace or as the way things actually happen, the question remains: is it in fact biblical? Do “the Scriptures and confessional standards make clear. . ..” what PSA and the synod claim about God? For the rest of this post and the one to follow (and perhaps one after that), I will address the claim that PSA is biblical in two parts. The first—the remainder of this post—will look at a key PSA claim: that it is supported by the Old Testament sacrificial system. The following post will look at how the New Testament, using Old Testament theological tropes including sacrifice, understands the cross of Jesus Christ. In fact , they don’t. In neither case does the claim of the synod hold up; the scriptures don’t support, let alone “make clear,” the teaching of PSA.

The Old Testament Sacrificial System: “Atoning” and “Non-Atoning” Sacrifices

The case for PSA often begins with Old Testament sacrifice. Consider this paragraph from Louis Berkhof’s Systematic Theology. In the middle of an extended discussion of atonement, he says about Old Testament sacrifice:

The Old Testament teaches us to regard the sacrifices that were brought upon the altar as vicarious [substitutionary]. When the Israelite brought a sacrifice to the Lord, he had to lay his hand on the head of the sacrifice and confess his sin. This action symbolized the transfer of sin to the offering, and rendered it fit to atone for the sin of the offerer, Lev. 1:4.  . . . After the laying on of hands death was vicariously inflicted on the sacrifice. The significance of this is clearly indicated in the classical passage that is found in Lev. 17:11: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you to make atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh atonement by reason of the life.” Says Dr. [Geerhardus] Vos, “The sacrificial animal in its death takes the place of the death due to the offerer. It is forfeit for forfeit.” The sacrifices so brought were pre-figurations of the one great sacrifice of Jesus Christ. (Systematic Theology. Kindle Edition. P. 316).

Berkhof throws out this characterization of Old Testament sacrifice as if it were received wisdom, which at the time it was, but almost none of it is correct. Old Testament sacrifices were not substitutionary, “forfeit for forfeit,” as Geerhardus Vos put it. The hands laid on the animal to be sacrificed were not a confession of guilt or a way of passing sins from the person bringing the offering to the animal about to be killed. Sacrifices were not about the death of the animal, and they did not symbolize the death of person making the sacrifice. These claims about OT sacrifice do not arise from a careful study of the text but from assumptions brought to the text by Christian interpreters. The symbolic universe of Old Testament sacrifice was far more complex and interesting than the assumptions of PSA theology give to it. If we are to get at how the Old Testament sacrificial system works, we have to begin not with our ideas about atonement—ideas that we find in later Christian theology—but with what we can learn from the Old Testament itself.

Studies of Old Testament sacrifice have burgeoned in the past few decades, owing mostly to the massive work of the late Jewish scholar, Jacob Milgrom. When I was in graduate school, I remember Milgrom coming year after year to the annual meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature and presenting his ongoing work on Old Testament religion and especially the sacrificial system as portrayed in Leviticus. His presentations were always fascinating. Milgrom’s massive study of Leviticus in the Anchor Bible series eventually came to nearly 4,000 pages (Leviticus: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. The Anchor Bible. Three volumes: Leviticus 1-16, 17-22, 23-27. Doubleday: 1998, 2000, 2001). 

Milgrom’s work has begun to influence Christian scholars. It lies behind a new and compelling book by King’s University (Edmonton) professor Andrew Rillera (Lamb of the Free: Recovering the Varied Sacrificial Understandings of Jesus’s Death. Cascade Books, 2024). Rillera brings the conclusions of Milgrom’s work on the Levitical codes, along with his own research, and uses it to gain a deeper understanding of sacrificial imagery not only in the Old Testament but in the New.

What Sacrifice Is Not

He begins his study with a chapter on “what sacrifice is not”. What it is not is mostly what PSA advocates commonly claim it to be. Compare Rillera’s list of what sacrifice is not to what Berkhof says about sacrifice in the passage quoted above. According to Rillera:

• Old Testament sacrifices are not substitutionary. The animal does not die instead of the person making the sacrifice.
• The laying on of hands does not represent transferring guilt to the animal in “atonement” sacrifices but rather designates the animal as belonging to the person making the sacrifice. (The two-hand ceremony in the Day of Atonement liturgy is different, putting the sins of the people on the head of a goat which is not sacrificed at all but sent into the wilderness.)
• Old Testament sacrifices are not about death including the death of the animal. The death of the animal is not itself part of the ritual.
• Old Testament sacrifices are not about suffering. The suffering of the animal has no theological import. It is to be kept to a minimum.

So how do sacrifices work in the Levitical legislation? To get at the significance of sacrifice in the Old Testament descriptions, it is important to distinguish among the various kinds of sacrifice. That said, a full list of sacrifices would take us too far afield. The system is complicated (Rillera’s book, which is not by any means a full description of Old Testament sacrifice, runs nevertheless to more than 500 pages). For Rillera’s purposes and ours, a rough and ready distinction between “atoning” and “non-atoning” sacrifices will suffice. 

The terminology, “atoning” and “non-atoning,” is Rillera’s, but it’s confusing. Rillera does not mean by designating certain sacrifices as “atoning” that they do what we ordinarily mean by “atonement.” The dictionary definition of “atonement” is “reparation”: repairing a relationship by paying some kind of price. We assume when we see “atoning” sacrifices that these sacrifices, along the lines of PSA, must involve the animal paying with its life for the sins of the person who brings the offering. But this is not the case. Rillera is simply retaining the tradition in almost all English translations of the Bible of glossing the Hebrew verb kipper by “make atonement.” But that’s all it means. When Rillera calls a sacfice “atoning” he means nothing more or less than whatever kipper means (36). It would perhaps have been better if Rillera had simply called these sacrifices kipper sacrifices. But of course, that begs the question: what does kipper mean?

Doing kipper

Consider one kipper sacrifice from a longer list of such sacrifices in Leviticus:

If anyone of the ordinary people among you sins unintentionally in doing any one of the things that by the Lord’s commandments ought not to be done and incurs guilt, when the sin that you have committed is made known to you, you shall bring a female goat without blemish as your offering, for the sin that you have committed. You shall lay your hand on the head of the sin offering; and the sin offering shall be slaughtered at the place of the burnt offering. The priest shall take some of its blood with his finger and put it on the horns of the altar of burnt offering, and he shall pour out the rest of its blood at the base of the altar. He shall remove all its fat, as the fat is removed from the offering of well-being, and the priest shall turn it into smoke on the altar for a pleasing odor to the Lord. Thus the priest shall make kipper on your behalf, and you shall be forgiven. (Leviticus 4:27-31)

The translation above is mostly from the New Revised Standard Version, but the NRSV has in the place of kipper “atonement”: “Thus the priest shall make atonement on your behalf. . ..” The “thus” is added by the translators, but it’s helpful. Doing or making kipper (kipper is a specific form of the Hebrew verb kāpar) involves smearing blood on the horns of the altar and pouring the rest out on the ground. But what does the ritual mean? Rillera, following Milgrom and others, suggests that kipper in this context does not mean “make atonement” but “purge” or “purify” and that what is being purified is not the person making the offering but the holy things of the sanctuary. 

In the case above, the sanctuary has been contaminated by the sin of the person making the offering. Having the sin contaminate the sanctuary makes the sanctuary inhospitable to God. If the sanctuary is left in its contaminated state, eventually God will no longer choose to live among the people. For this reason, it’s important that the holy things of the sanctuary be scrubbed, purified. To do so is to do kipper. It’s, in Rillera’s description, a kind of cleaning up after oneself. One might think of it as a form of spiritual hygiene.

With this in mind, you can see how calling the kipper ritual “atonement” is misleading. “Atonement” points to the person making the offering while doing kipper points in the opposite direction, toward the contamination of the sanctuary. Rillera makes several other points about these kipper sacrifices that make their application to Christian atonement theology dubious. One is that these sacrifices have a limited scope. When they are sin offerings, they are for inadvertent sins—things one does without really meaning to do them. They don’t work for intentional sins. A murderer, for example, cannot get off by doing kipper. And not only that, but kipper is specified in cases of ritual impurity as well—things like scale disease and post-parturition bleeding—that have nothing to do with sin at all. Nor does kipper necessarily involve blood. If you are poor, you can bring an offering of grain and still have the priest do kipper. It doesn’t require a death.

The Significance of Blood

Nevertheless, blood is key for understanding kipper though perhaps not in the way you might think. For sacrifice, as for any religious ritual, we need to distinguish between the ritual and the explanation for the ritual. Rituals are always more than their explanations. And for Old Testament sacrifice, there is not much in the way of theological explanation. Even the detailed levitical descriptions of sacrifice, from two sources, conventionally called P (Priestly) and H (Holiness), are from a later time when the temple had been destroyed and sacrifice was no longer an ordinary part of the religious life of Jews. But where we have an explanation for sacrifice, it’s not the shedding of blood itself that is ritually important but what the blood does.

A key passage in this regard is Leviticus 17:10-13. Here are the crucial verses:

If anyone of the household of Israel or of the aliens who reside among them eats any blood, I will set my face against that person who eats blood, and I will cut that person off from among the people. For the life of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you for the altar to do kipper for your lives; for it is the blood with [its] life in it that effects kipper.

Rillera rightly relates this passage to Genesis 9, the covenant Yhwh makes with Noah after the flood. To that point, Yhwh had allowed humans to eat plants but not animals, but now, post-deluge, Yhwh will allow humans also to eat animals provided that they do not eat “the flesh with its life in it, its blood” (Genesis 9:4). This represents a moral fiction: when you eat the meat of a fellow creature, the rule suggests, even though you must kill it, you must not consume its life. The ritual involves killing so that it is not really killing. So what do you do with the blood? There are protocols for this. One protocol is to use the blood in the kipper ritual, as a way of scrubbing, as it were, death from the sanctuary and restoring life. 

Reflecting on Ritual

So Rillera argues, following Milgrom. After reviewing all the instances of kipper and words related to kipper in the Hebrew Bible, I find myself thinking that there is more going on in this ritual than Rillera’s explanation of kipper as purification will accommodate. I try to imagine myself into the ceremony: laying my hand on the goat or another animal, killing the animal, collecting the blood, handing the blood to the priest, who then paints it on the horns of the altar and splashes it on the ground around the base of altar. What would the ritual mean to me? In some inchoate sense, the smeared blood effects for my relationship with Yhwh (and with the people of Yhwh) a kind of forgetfulness. My sin has been scrubbed away. How it does this is far from clear despite Leviticus 17, but then rituals are never meant to be clear.

But here’s the surprise. When the New Testament picks up sacrificial imagery to portray the meaning of the cross of Jesus, with two exceptions that I’ll come to later in this series, it’s not the kipper sacrifices—what Rillera calls “atoning” sacrifices—that the New Testament seems to have in mind. If you come to Old Testament sacrifice from the point of view of PSA, this is not what you would expect. You would expect the New Testament to focus on sacrifices that have something to do with atonement, but this is not the case. The New Testament seems mostly to have in mind sacrifices of the “non-atoning” kind.

These include wellbeing sacrifices, what in Hebrew are called šəlāmîm, from the Hebrew word group that also includes šālôm (shalom). They are communal sacrifices of thanksgiving and celebration that include portions for God, for the priests, and for everyone else. Community meals. Church potlucks come to mind. Or, perhaps, the Lord’s Supper.

Another “non-atoning” sacrifice, a variation on wellbeing sacrifice, is involved in covenant-making ceremonies (see Exodus 24:3-8). This ritual also includes eating and drinking. After slaughtering the animals, some of the flesh is offered up as a burnt offering and some of it forms the basis for a festival meal. The blood is also divided. Some of the blood is splashed on the altar and some on the people. It’s as if to consecrate at the same time altar and people or, better, Yhwh and Israel—to bond them in the blood. It’s this ceremony to which Jesus expressly refers when he says of the communion cup, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood” (1 Corinthians 11:25; cf. Exodus 24:8). 

I’ll have more to say about this in later posts. The imagery involved in these ceremonies is rich and layered. What it is not is penal or substitutionary. And when the New Testament does turn to the “atoning” kippersacrifices in Hebrews and 1 John, it does so in ways that remain neither penal nor substitutionary. To rest PSA on Old Testament sacrifice fails at every point.

When a Sacrificial Act is Not a Sacrifice

But what of the passages in the Old Testament that are not sacrificial but nevertheless seem to speak of someone standing in for someone else, crucially Isaiah 53? Do these passages, quite aside from the sacrificial system, support the central idea of PSA, the idea that Christ died instead of us, paying the penalty that should have fallen on us? Rillera says emphatically no (see Lamb 384-91). But that’s for next time. And along the way, in looking at Isaiah 53 and the use made of Isaiah 53 in the New Testament, we’ll have the chance to examine material from 2 and 4 Maccabees that not only reinforces Rillera’s no but points to an understanding of the cross of Jesus that, were it adopted by the church, would lead Christian in a new and more Christ-like direction. It’s to that we will turn in the next post. Stay tuned.

Clay