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Atonement - The Debate About How Jesus Saves
0 Playsin 6 hours
Did Jesus satisfy God’s wrath on the cross? Christians have developed a wide variety of theories to explain how Jesus saves from sin. The most popular theory in Evangelical churches, Penal Substitutionary Atonement, is considered central to the gospel by some, an unbiblical distortion by others. Matt and Nick look at the history and development of atonement theories through church history in order to understand the origins of this debate and the way it’s being handled by Evangelical churches today.
Resource Referenced: The Major Works by St. Anselm of Canterbury, The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views Edited by Jakes K. Beilby, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of Atonement by Gustaf Aulen, The Atonement: Its Meaning and Significance by Leon Morris, The Cross of Christ by John Stott, Recovering the Scandal of the Cross: Atonement in New Testament and Contemporary Contexts by Mark Baker and Joel Green, Two Views of the Cross: Orthodoxy and the West by Frederica Mathewes-Green, Reclaiming the Atonement by Patrick Henry Reardon, Word Studies in the New Testament by Marvin R. Vincent, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion by N.T. Wright
Interlude Music: Known and Loved by JOYSPRING
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Transcript
Reparadigm Podcast Returns
00:00:00
Speaker
Howdy y'all, it's the Reparadigm Podcast. We are back after a little hiatus with more episodes dropping in 2026.
Introduction to Atonement and Jesus' Work
00:00:07
Speaker
We hope you enjoy and are blessed by this first conversation of the year on the atonement, the work of Jesus.
00:00:28
Speaker
In Matthew 1.21, the angel tells Joseph, she will give birth to a son and you are to give him the name Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.
Exploring Atonement Theories
00:00:38
Speaker
In John 1.29, the next day, John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
00:00:47
Speaker
How does the death of Jesus save people from sin? Or put another way, how does atonement work? yeah Scripture presents a wide variety of images describing atonement, and Christians through history have tried to organize these descriptions.
00:01:01
Speaker
They've developed a variety of atonement theories. Today, for evangelicals, the most commonly held theory is called penal substitutionary atonement. Thomas Schreiner wrote, The theory of penal substitutionary atonement is the heart and soul of an evangelical view of the atonement. Yeah.
00:01:17
Speaker
So whether or not you're familiar with that title, you've probably heard the idea. Yeah, I feel like a lot of people listening to this might not have ever heard of that, or they don't say that, certainly in their day-to-day.
00:01:29
Speaker
Here's Schreiner's summary of penal substitutionary atonement. The Father, because of his love for human beings, sent his Son, who offered himself willingly and gladly, to satisfy God's justice, so that Christ took the place of sinners.
00:01:43
Speaker
The punishment and penalty we deserved was laid on Jesus Christ instead of us, so that in the cross, both God's holiness and love are manifested.
Early Christian Views on Atonement
00:01:52
Speaker
This theory is usually taken as a basic fact in evangelical churches.
00:01:56
Speaker
In fact, if you ask an evangelical to define the gospel, there's a good chance that they'll describe penal substitutionary atonement. It's kind of equated with the gospel. Whether or not you know that, it it is.
00:02:09
Speaker
Penal substitutionary atonement is not the only way the Christians have understood atonement. Early Christians described it pretty differently, actually. And other Christian traditions even view the theory as an unbiblical misrepresentation of God's character.
00:02:23
Speaker
Today, there's a movement within the evangelical church calling this theory into question. A little dive into history can help us understand this predicament we find ourselves in the church today. So when early Christians talked about Jesus saving us from our sins, they mostly described Jesus' work in terms of victory.
00:02:40
Speaker
So this is an approach that gets labeled Christus Victor, if you just can't stop from using Latin. I know you love your Latin. So Irenaeus wrote, For what purpose did Christ come down from heaven that he might destroy sin, overcome death and give life to man?
00:02:55
Speaker
When early Christians described the condition of fallen humanity, they described humanity as enslaved to the evil forces of sin, death and the devil. This wasn't just a passive enslavement either.
00:03:06
Speaker
Humanity gave idolatrous worship to these powers. So God's saving work through Jesus was to defeat these evil powers, provide forgiveness, and reconcile humanity to himself.
00:03:18
Speaker
Early Christian writers explored lots of images for atonement, but they usually took Jesus' victory as being fundamental.
Anselm's Satisfaction Theory and Its Impact
00:03:24
Speaker
Gregory of Nassianus, when he described the purpose of Jesus becoming human, said that God, by overcoming the tyrant, might set us free and reconcile us with himself through his Son. yeah There's a lot of language in the New Testament that describes Jesus winning a victory, defeating death, defeating the devil, overcoming sin and death.
00:03:43
Speaker
They took that sort of imagery as being central to their understanding of what it means for Jesus to save us from our sins. This sort of Christus Victor understanding of atonement has a lot of things going for it, and but it doesn't really provide a detailed description for the mechanism of atonement.
00:04:00
Speaker
How exactly does Jesus' death defeat the forces of evil? Early Christian writers explored different answers to this question, but they didn't always seem too concerned about answering it. Yeah, it doesn't describe in great detail exactly how it works.
00:04:13
Speaker
It almost seems like a bit of a narrative flourish. Like this is how victory was achieved. This is how the story ends in this like grandiose type of language. But you're not describing exactly how the devil, sin death were all put into their like defeated corner or whatever. You know, there's maybe some picturesque language about that.
00:04:34
Speaker
This theory and the scriptures that describe it don't satisfy all the curiosities that we might have about how Jesus victory. That's why we need a satisfaction theory. a theory that's a little more satisfactory.
00:04:45
Speaker
If we fast forward to the 11th century, St. Anselm of Canterbury was a theologian living in Middle Age Europe. He formulated a theory of atonement with a more definite mechanism inspired by the feudalism of his time.
00:04:58
Speaker
Frederick Matthews Green writes, The feudal system laid great emphasis on the preservation of honor. A feudal lord was not free to forgive an insult, not even if the offended admitted their guilt and apologized.
00:05:10
Speaker
such a lord was obliged to demand the satisfaction of his honor for the social order to be sustained. That's interesting. It was like an obligation he had to demand retribution of some kind, even if he wanted to be good-hearted enough to just take the penalty upon himself, so to speak, or you know bear the brunt of that and let the matter go.
00:05:29
Speaker
There was like a social obligation, perhaps a legal one in some context, to demand retribution. Yeah. For a feudal lord to simply forgive a wrong done against him would have been viewed as sort of a threat to the social order.
00:05:42
Speaker
The economic order, the political order, all of that. Yeah, I think kind of the stability of the hierarchical system that kind of defined the way their world worked. Yeah, and certainly obviously defined the economy.
00:05:53
Speaker
So for this culture that viewed power within this kind of honor-based hierarchy, the idea that God sent Jesus to die for the forgiveness of humans seemed unreasonable or irrational.
Reformation and Opposition to Satisfaction Theory
00:06:05
Speaker
Anselm wrote a book called Crusdeus Homo, or Why God Became Man, in response to this criticism. He argued that human infraction against God, who had more honor to preserve than any human feudal lord, constitutes an unpayable debt.
00:06:19
Speaker
So just as it was wrong for feudal lord to forgive an infraction against his honor, God, to be reasonable, must demand satisfaction for the infraction against his honor because it's higher honor than any feudal lord.
00:06:31
Speaker
m Makes sense if you're viewing God through his economic system that he would have been familiar with. So as Anselm wrote, God cannot forgive our sins without punishment, for that would leave sin uncorrected.
00:06:43
Speaker
If God treated sinful and sinless people alike, it would constitute injustice. ah God cannot forgive our sins without punishment.
00:06:54
Speaker
I feel like that's important. Anselm reasoned in this book that Christ, who lived a righteous life, in his death earned a sort of honor merit that could be used to cover humanity's honor debt to God.
00:07:07
Speaker
Got it. So while the early church had focused on atonement through God's overcoming of evil forces, Anselm focused on Jesus satisfying God's intrinsic demand for justice. Mm-hmm.
00:07:20
Speaker
Now, this shift was really effective in Middle Age Europe, and in the following centuries, this satisfaction-based understanding of atonement became the standard teaching of the Western Church.
00:07:31
Speaker
As this idea developed in this Western Catholic Church, it came to be understood that Jesus, in his suffering and death, provided the satisfaction for humanity's mortal sins, the ones that would otherwise damn them to hell.
00:07:45
Speaker
Once someone was redeemed, the satisfaction provided by Jesus allowed that redeemed to enter into friendship with God by grace. Got it. Yep. Now, the smaller, what they called venial sins that remained part of the life of the redeemed. Right, because no one's perfect. Yep. Still had to be dealt with. They still required additional satisfaction.
00:08:04
Speaker
So these venial sins had to be purified by penance and charity in believer's life. Now, if that believer died with some of those venial sins still unpaid for, right, still on the books, they would have to go through purgatory, a state of purification after death.
00:08:18
Speaker
Some Christian leaders began to sell credits for purgatory reduction as indulgences. And this system of indulgences wasn't officially sanctioned or managed by the church institution.
00:08:28
Speaker
It's kind of like locally run and it was ripe for corruption. Yeah, I can only imagine. But it makes sense that all these ideas start coalescing together. Yeah, you can see how those ideas kind of stack. when on top Yeah, exactly. Now, this system of indulgences was popular in the Western church, but it wasn't universal.
00:08:46
Speaker
Remember, Anselm developed his satisfaction-based atonement in the 11th century. This is the same time as the Great Schism, where the Western Latin church and the Eastern Orthodox church split. Anselm was part of the Western Latin church, and that's where his ideas became popular.
00:09:01
Speaker
But the satisfaction-based atonement didn't influence Eastern
Divergence in Eastern and Western Church Doctrines
00:09:06
Speaker
Orthodox theology. Right, no. They continued to teach atonement with a focus on Christ's victory over evil. So this means that Catholic doctrines like purgatory and indulgences for the satisfaction of sins never developed in the Eastern church. They had no reason to develop these ideas because they never adopted a satisfaction-based understanding of atonement. And that's true to this day.
00:09:26
Speaker
These doctrines were invented to solve for specific problems that Anselm's popular satisfaction theory created. Without Anselm's theory, though, there's no need to create categories like venial sins or mortal sins or inherited sins. So therefore, there's no need for purgatory and penance and indulgences to deal with those sin categories.
00:09:46
Speaker
So a tradition that didn't follow Anselm's original theory didn't have to answer all of those subsequent questions, and therefore the tradition ends up just looking very different in the way it talks about all of these things.
00:09:58
Speaker
Exactly. As one Greek Orthodox archdiocese notes, The Orthodox Church does not believe in indulgences as remissions from purgatorial punishment. Both purgatory and indulgences are intercorrelated theories, unwitnessed in the Bible or in the ancient church.
00:10:12
Speaker
And when they were enforced and implied, they brought about evil practices at the expense of the prevailing truths of the church. The church lived for 1,500 years without such a theory. Wow.
00:10:22
Speaker
Now in the West, where they did have this satisfaction-based understanding of the atonement, And then they developed this corrupt selling of indulgences. This is exactly where the Protestant Reformation was sparked. Yeah, I think most people know about the indulgences. Most Protestants know about this practice because of the outrage that it rightfully stirred up within Martin Luther, obviously the father of the Reformation. Yeah.
00:10:46
Speaker
Now, central to this Protestant movement was the doctrine that in his suffering and death, Jesus fully satisfied God's justice by absorbing God's wrath against sin.
00:10:57
Speaker
So there was nothing left over that had to be paid for through penance, charity, or purgatory. So a believer, despite still struggling with sins, received the righteousness of Jesus, which covered their condition like snow over a dunghill.
00:11:13
Speaker
So their sins, mortal and venial, were fully accounted for. The specifics of this Protestant understanding were described by John Calvin and came to be known as penal substitutionary atonement.
00:11:25
Speaker
As Calvin wrote, Hmm.
00:11:36
Speaker
to appease his wrath and satisfy
Modern Critique and Debates on Atonement Theories
00:11:38
Speaker
his just judgment Again, this is just not the way the East would be talking about this all together. So it's interesting to see where the rabbit hole has taken us.
00:11:48
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of interesting to compare Protestant and Catholic understandings of the atonement and these doctrines with the doctrines in the East. Because this shift that separated Protestants from Catholics had huge implications on daily church function, yeah obviously. yeah It rejected a lot of the practices that have become commonplace within the Catholic Church.
00:12:07
Speaker
But doctrinally, it's kind of a minor change. It still very much stays as an Anselmian-based satisfaction system. Right. So like in Calvin and Luther, it's just another way to solve for the same problems that Anselm's theory created.
00:12:24
Speaker
We're still living in Anselm's world, kind of. And as such, like the Protestant view of the atonement is still basically just the medieval Roman Catholic post-Anselm view with some tweaking around the edges.
00:12:35
Speaker
Yeah, in fact, John Stott comments on how similar these Protestant and Catholic systems have in common. He writes, One may say that evangelicals and Roman Catholics together teach that God by his grace is the only savior of sinners, that self-salvation is impossible, and that the death of Jesus Christ as a propitiatory sacrifice is the ultimate ground of salvation.
00:12:56
Speaker
The Protestant Penal Substitutionary Atonement and the Roman Catholic Purgatory Atonement System both operate on the same basic understanding of sin as individual guilt brought about through a sinful nature.
00:13:08
Speaker
So, in both systems, sin invokes God's wrath and demands a form of satisfaction to be paid through suffering. Both systems even view Jesus' suffering and death as that needed satisfaction.
00:13:20
Speaker
There's another element here that's been introduced that we didn't identify before when you were talking about Anselm, and that's this individualistic guilt that one incurs, and and sin as the missing of the mark, that incurs that individual guilt before God.
00:13:35
Speaker
That combined with the understanding of God as a feudal lord who can't just forgive, like that is unjust for him just to forgive. It's not in his nature. He cannot do that. He must have reparation. He must have retribution.
00:13:50
Speaker
So those two things combined lead Catholics and Protestants to talk about the death of Jesus in a way that the early church and East certainly wouldn't talk about it at all. I think that's kind of worthwhile to just sit with. Yeah, there's definitely a shift there from the early Christian and Eastern understandings of atonement that describe Jesus saving humanity from our sin problem versus this Western church where the focus is very much on, well, Jesus saves me from my sin guilt problem.
00:14:18
Speaker
Yeah, and even the direction of payment is kind of reversed a little bit where, again, you get this vague language in some of the early church fathers about payment being made. You see a little bit of that in the New Testament, too. But it seems like the payment is going, if anything, toward the sin and death, not toward the father.
00:14:36
Speaker
So, this is not saying that, you know, Calvin wasn't right, Luther wasn't right, Anselm wasn't right. It's just to trace where the theory came from and how it started to bear fruit theologically in the Catholic and Protestant traditions.
00:14:49
Speaker
Fruit that wasn't experienced and still isn't by the Eastern Church and other traditions. Yeah. So the debate going on in the church today about how we understand atonement is at its heart a debate about whether or not we
Cultural and Scriptural Interpretations of Atonement
00:15:02
Speaker
should follow along with Anselm's description of atonement as a form of satisfaction to God.
00:15:07
Speaker
So those who are opposed to Anselm's satisfaction-based framework are opposed to all the theories that are based on satisfaction. That's the Catholic purgatory system and the penal substitutionary atonement system. Mm-hmm.
00:15:20
Speaker
Now, this movement, by some away from penal substitutionary atonement, doesn't argue that the reformers were wrong in their disagreements with the Catholic Church. In fact, this movement argues that the Reformation should have gone even further, should have challenged more of the underlying assumptions behind the Catholic doctrine.
00:15:37
Speaker
They would argue that instead of coming up with another satisfaction-based atonement, the reformers should have gone all the way and abandoned the Anselmian satisfaction system. Right. The underlying assumptions that were made there.
00:15:49
Speaker
so the point is basically like, hey, Protestant reformers, ah we're still pretty much Catholic over here. So let's go further and let's get back to our roots. Let's get back to an older way of talking about the death and the work of Jesus.
00:16:04
Speaker
And obviously, we can't go back and change the last 500 years. It was satisfaction based theory of atonement that was key to the formation of the Protestant church. The centrality of this doctrine for Protestants has led some to equate the gospel itself with penal substitutionary atonement.
00:16:20
Speaker
It's common to see Protestant organizations include language around Jesus satisfying God's justice by paying the price for our sins right in their definition of the gospel. Yeah, I think this is basically universal amongst Protestants, and it's found in nearly every evangelical church's statement of faith.
00:16:37
Speaker
Some Protestants go so far as to claim that to be saved requires belief in penal substitutionary atonement. Right. They probably don't require that you know that word or know that phrase, but you need to understand and believe the tenets of it.
00:16:50
Speaker
Now, thankfully, that is a minority opinion. However, it is common for evangelical organizations to use penal substitutionary atonement as a sort of litmus test for trustworthy teaching. Got it. yeah So using this litmus test, anyone who advocates for a return to older Christian understandings of the atonement can get blacklisted. Some evangelical churches won't use the work of scholars like N.T. Wright or material from organizations like The Bible Project because they don't teach penal substitutionary atonement.
00:17:20
Speaker
The first and maybe even the only interaction many evangelicals have with this debate is when they're being warned not to use the work of some scholar or organization because they don't teach the true gospel.
00:17:32
Speaker
Sometimes code for they don't teach the right atonement theory. Yeah. People are warned to avoid this debate instead of being encouraged to engage it meaningfully. Yeah. When this debate is addressed, it's often addressed really superficially.
00:17:47
Speaker
Sometimes one theory will simply be described as the one that quote-unquote contains the other. So defenses of penal substitutionary atonement will sometimes argue that there is no contradiction because a penal substitutionary atonement theory includes the idea that Christ is victorious.
00:18:03
Speaker
Sure. The actual differences between these atonement theories aren't always described well, and they can be difficult to understand because both theories interpret the language of Scripture in subtly different ways that can have really big impacts on meaning. Yeah, yeah.
00:18:16
Speaker
I think it's probably helpful to take a minute and describe the key differences between how these theories interpret Scripture.
00:18:24
Speaker
The Atonement
00:18:32
Speaker
you
00:18:37
Speaker
Scripture has a lot of different ways of describing Jesus' atoning work. These are sometimes called like different images, somewhere around a dozen or so, depending on how you count and organize them. Some of the more common ones in Scripture are to use temple imagery.
00:18:51
Speaker
So Scripture will describe Jesus as the sacrifice for our sins. Or legal imagery, say that Jesus removes the guilt of human sin. ah Military imagery, where Jesus is described as winning a victory over death in the forces of evil.
00:19:06
Speaker
Scripture will describe this as a rescue from slavery, saying Jesus gave himself as a ransom. It'll use financial imagery, describing humanity as owing a sin debt, which Jesus absolves.
00:19:19
Speaker
There's covenant imagery used, so humanity is described as being under a curse, which Jesus took on himself. What these atonement theories try to do is figure out which one of these images is the foundational or central one that works to explain all the others.
00:19:33
Speaker
As an example, let's compare the way Christus Victor and penal substitutionary atonement understand the images of victory and sacrifice. So in Christus Victor, the central image of atonement is Jesus' victory over the powers, freeing humanity.
00:19:48
Speaker
In winning this victory, Jesus, as humanity's representative, died and went to God's presence to reconcile humanity to God. What do you call it when someone or something dies in a person's place to reconcile that person with God?
00:20:01
Speaker
A sacrifice. That's a sacrifice. So because of the means and the result of his victory, he can be described as a sort of sacrifice. Yeah, you seem to be paraphrasing the book of Hebrews here.
00:20:12
Speaker
Now, in penal substitutionary atonement, Jesus' sacrifice is taken as a foundational image. And not just sacrifice in the sense of a death that brings atonement, but sacrifice is understood as being penal, meaning the sacrificial death pays a required price, satisfying God's justice, like in a courtroom context.
00:20:33
Speaker
So atonement is accomplished through Jesus' suffering and death, paying the legal demand to satisfy God's wrath. So sin, death, Satan, the forces of evil, this is all viewed as consequences of humanity for living in the guilt of sin.
00:20:47
Speaker
Because Jesus dealt with the sin guilt through his sacrifice, these forces are then nullified. They are defeated. Okay. So in PSA, penal substitutionary atonement, we're very much focusing on the means or like putting the magnifying glass over the sacrifice and then saying out of this, everything else flows. So if it can be described as a victory, it's only a victory because of this sacrifice and the mechanism of paying the debt or absolving of the guilt or whatever the theory entails.
00:21:18
Speaker
Whereas maybe in Christus Victor, you describe Jesus as having accomplished victory over sin and its consequences, death and the dark powers of evil that are behind all of that.
00:21:28
Speaker
And that involves, sure, a sacrifice, but it's not like getting into the nitty gritty details or like I said, putting a magnifying glass over that sacrifice and then trying to explain exactly how it's achieving victory over sin, evil, death and the adversary.
00:21:44
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. i think you could say that in both theories, there's kind of one image that stands alone. And then the rest of the image is kind of dependent on that. Got it. Yeah. So in Christus Victor, you have to see Jesus as victorious over these powers. And then you can understand all the other images that scripture uses.
00:22:00
Speaker
Whereas in penal substitutionary atonement, you have to understand what Jesus' sacrifice accomplishes. And then all the other images can make sense after that. So both theories affirm that Jesus is victorious over the powers of evil.
00:22:13
Speaker
Both theories affirm that Jesus is a sacrifice for our sins, but they differ in the way that they logically organize the images. Scripture gives us all these images of atonement, but doesn't provide clear instructions for how to organize them.
00:22:28
Speaker
So for the sake of explaining these, we've been chatting about these two theories so far. But there's no shortage of other images that have been explored and considered as foundational. You could take healing or forgiveness or governmental function. Take your pick.
00:22:41
Speaker
You can find well-thought thinkers who've explored all of these different images as being foundational to an understanding of atonement. Some theologians have argued that we're not supposed to try to develop a single system that organizes all these images.
00:22:54
Speaker
that the variety is intentional, and potentially we do a disservice to scripture when we try to find a foundational image that explains the rest. Joel Green and Mark Baker have written about this.
00:23:06
Speaker
They've argued that the variety of images was intended to help readers appreciate that Jesus' atoning work affects every aspect of the cosmos and a human experience. So they've also argued that in scripture, the variety of images employed is effective messaging.
00:23:21
Speaker
Framing Jesus' restorative work in different contexts can help different audiences appreciate the message. So where an image of Jesus as victorious might make more sense for one audience, maybe for another audience, the image of Jesus relieving humanity of their sin debt might be more effective. Yeah, or for a Sikh audience, the image of Jesus as healer is effective. I think this is really powerful because there are a lot of cultures in the world where a PSA model or some other specific model wouldn't really even communicate the problem or the solution very effectively to that culture.
00:23:57
Speaker
The PSA model was birthed out of a context where individual guilt and retributive justice were important issues to solve for, but not every culture shares those concepts or even thinks them to be like valid or important.
00:24:12
Speaker
To limit the work of Jesus or even to like put the magnifying glass to focus the work of Jesus and and see it as a solution to satisfy medieval European sensibilities is just kind of a little bit off, I think.
00:24:25
Speaker
we would probably be better served using the rich imagery of the scriptures like you described, a bunch of different imagery that's used, and perhaps not even speculating or trying to develop a sophisticated theory about exactly how the mechanism of atonement works specifically in God's economy.
00:24:44
Speaker
I'll say i kind of enjoy the exercise and the thought process behind trying to understand atonement or trying to figure out if there's a way that these pieces can fit together. But I think you're right that we need to be cautious about how dogmatic we get about it.
00:24:57
Speaker
Kind of like our last conversation about apologetics. It's like a useful thing to do with your mind, but like don't get dogmatic about it or don't like build your faith upon some epistemology that thinks you can like prove all or actually achieve certainty or something like that. Like that's a really bad idea to build your faith on like evidentialism or something like that.
00:25:21
Speaker
But as a practice for your mind, it's probably a useful thing to do, like try to tidy up your theology and make sense of the world develop answers in a similar sort of way. Maybe it is a worthwhile thing to do to figure out exactly how the atonement mechanism works.
00:25:38
Speaker
But probably don't assume that you have like the end-all be-all theory because your answers are going to be birthed out of your context that you're familiar with and therefore limited by that context as well.
PSA's Theological Debates on God's Justice
00:25:50
Speaker
Yeah. So dogmatism is what is to be avoided there.
00:26:06
Speaker
So different understandings of the atonement will take different images as central. And penal substitutionary atonement takes sacrifice as its sort of central image of the atonement. But that's not actually what makes it so contentious.
00:26:18
Speaker
The contentious part of PSA is the specific way that it interprets sacrifice. So in PSA, Jesus' sacrificial suffering and death appease God's wrath to satisfy God's justice.
00:26:31
Speaker
In other systems, Jesus suffers and dies because he steps in the way of sin, and suffering and death are integrally connected to sin. But in penal substitutionary atonement, Jesus took onto himself the full judicial penalty of all sins committed.
00:26:46
Speaker
Yeah, it's ah there's a difference there for sure. So as the famous PSA hymn puts it, on the cross as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied. Yeah, we sing that all the time.
00:26:57
Speaker
Isn't that just the gospel? Yeah. It's this aspect of satisfaction, it's an integral part of PSA that sits at the center of the debate going on.
00:27:08
Speaker
So other atonement theories agree that Jesus suffered the consequence of sins, they agree that he acted as a sacrifice, and that he was a representative substitute. Satisfaction theories hold that God's character is such that he requires the payment of a penalty for the sins committed by mankind.
00:27:26
Speaker
Other theories hold that God can forgive sins without payment. Now, he may still demand payment of sins, but he can forgive them. However, in PSA, God's justice as part of his intrinsic character demands payment for the penalty of sins for his wrath to be appeased.
00:27:43
Speaker
Yeah, I was starting to say this earlier, but this is really key, I think. So in PSA, the issue is not really essentially about forgiveness. It's about justice.
00:27:54
Speaker
So as the theory goes, it's assumed that God's justice is retributive. That is an assumption, by the way. Like, that's definitely debatable. But the assumption is that it is retributive, that he must repay in kind for people's sin.
00:28:10
Speaker
So if you sin against an infinite God, as it goes, you must pay an infinite consequence. So God is only being consistent with his own character when he exacts those consequences upon sinners.
00:28:23
Speaker
The way God is gracious to sinners is by taking those consequences upon himself, or at least one member of the Trinity does it. Yes. And that's central to the PSA system. It's those two elements exemplify God's justice or his holiness and his love. So his character is such that he demands payment for these sins, but then he is loving and that he, through Jesus, provides the payment that is demanded.
00:28:48
Speaker
Right. And again, that's why I said this is important. I'm not trying to make much of it. I'm just stating the fact that this really isn't about forgiveness. It's about how, I guess, justice in this system works and how God shows his love in this system towards sinners.
00:29:04
Speaker
God is conceived to quite literally not have the ability, it is not within God's character, to forgive without payment of wrongdoing. In a world of sin, there must be a consequence paid for that sin.
00:29:19
Speaker
So the only way that sinners get off the hook is if God exacts that consequence upon someone. So the theory is one of the members of the Trinity gets that consequence placed upon him.
00:29:30
Speaker
It's that different understanding of God's character that really is the underlying difference between satisfaction theories and other understandings of the atonement. Yeah, absolutely. i mean, even if you just made the assumption that God can forgive and just bear wrongdoing done to him in himself without repaying, without exacting retribution, if you assume that God can forgive in that way, then you don't need this entire mechanism altogether.
00:29:57
Speaker
And so then Jesus's death means something. He certainly did die by Roman crucifixion, and it certainly did mean a lot of things to
Biblical Texts and PSA Support
00:30:04
Speaker
early Christians. Obviously, the New Testament is rife with all kinds of language about what Jesus's death did.
00:30:11
Speaker
But the focus is not going to be about how that solved the cosmic courtroom's justice so that the sinner didn't have to be down forever. Other images will be used to describe what's going on there.
00:30:24
Speaker
As we're talking about it, even, i mean, that's where we're left. We're left talking and debating about the character of God. Can God forgive and bear the brunt of our sin toward him? Or must God repay?
00:30:37
Speaker
Is God's justice such that it's wrong, literally impossible for him to forgive without repayment? ah This is a worthwhile question. I don't think it's like an easy answer, but like that's a worthy thing to debate.
00:30:49
Speaker
I think the obvious place to take that question is to the Bible. Does the Bible teach that Jesus on the cross suffers the wrath of God to satisfy his justice? Because that's the central claim of penal substitutionary atonement and other satisfaction-based theories that are so contentious.
00:31:07
Speaker
Now, the specific biblical arguments for that idea come from a few key passages. The Suffering Servant Songs of Isaiah 42-53 describe a representative servant who comes to establish God's reign suffering and taking on the sins of the people.
00:31:24
Speaker
Isaiah 53-10 is often considered the clearest expression of this propitiation in the Bible, the idea that Jesus suffers God's wrath to satisfy his justice.
00:31:36
Speaker
Isaiah 53.10 says, Yet it was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer. And though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.
00:31:49
Speaker
New Testament writers quote several times from these servant songs, pointing to Jesus as their fu fulfillment. Matthew's gospel account alone has seven or eight of these references. However, nowhere does the New Testament specifically quote this verse, Isaiah 53.10.
00:32:06
Speaker
So many aspects of the suffering servant songs are connected to Jesus, but never explicitly this verse that some claim teaches propitiation. It's interesting, you'd almost expect it to be quoted, if not in the Gospels, at least in Paul.
00:32:22
Speaker
I mean, the gospels kind of give us a hard time because they actually don't offer hardly any theory of the atonement at all. In Paul, you've got quite a bit more theologizing about the mechanism or, you know, getting into the weeds about what the death of Jesus meant.
00:32:36
Speaker
But even in Paul, you don't have him appealing to Isaiah 53 10, which is a little bit surprising. Yeah. Granted, it is an argument from silence, but if Paul wanted to teach clearly the propitiation of Jesus, he had a perfect place to pull from in Isaiah 53.10 to say that Jesus was the fulfillment in that way.
00:32:54
Speaker
You'd expect to see it in Hebrews, too, because that's where you get language about the temple scene and the sacrificial system. And in fact, the mercy seat, you know, where atonement is made. And even there, the focus is upon the life of Jesus going into the presence of God to act as representative. It's not about God being satisfied by the death of Jesus.
00:33:14
Speaker
So even there, it's like a big mess if it's trying to teach PSA.
00:33:33
Speaker
Now, as far New Testament places where potentially it does make claims regarding propitiation, there's a specific group of words coming from the same root word, this hilas, that's used a few times the New Testament.
00:33:45
Speaker
Many have argued that these verses teach the propitiation of God's wrath. The debate actually gets reflected in English translations of verses like 1 John 2.2 that called Jesus the hilasmos for our sins, and not only for ours, but also for the sins of the whole world. Yeah, sometimes you see like propitiation or sometimes you see expiation and that just that's like reflecting this debate going on behind the scenes. Exactly. So translations like the Revised Standard Version translate this as Jesus is the expiation for our sins, simply meaning that he gets rid of them. The English Standard Version translates Elasimus here as propitiation. Good Reformed folks. Suggesting something like penal substitutionary atonement is what's going on.
00:34:25
Speaker
Some translators, either because they didn't think these words were intelligible or because they wanted to sidestep the debate, just translate this as Jesus is the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Yeah. As if atoning is like a normal English word to use. It's potentially a lot better than propitiation or expiation. Maybe.
00:34:44
Speaker
Looking at another passage, in Romans 3.25, the way we understand helasterion there influences the way we interpret this entire passage in Romans 3. So in Romans 3.25, God presented Christ as the Elastirion through the shedding of his blood to be received by faith.
00:35:02
Speaker
He did this to demonstrate his righteousness. So PSA would take Elastirion here to mean a propitiating sacrifice. So God demonstrating his righteousness means God demonstrated his perfect justice in sending Jesus to suffer his wrath for sins.
00:35:18
Speaker
Now, if philasterion here is reference to a place of expiation, like the mercy seat, as it's used in the Old Testament,
Alternative Interpretations and Scriptural Language
00:35:25
Speaker
then God demonstrating his righteousness is a reference to his work in maintaining covenant relationship, recalling the Day of Atonement sacrifice, where blood was placed on the mercy seat, the hilasterion in the Greek subtuagent.
00:35:38
Speaker
So you can see it either way. It's like what you desire to be true, you will see in the text in this case. Yeah. And when you look at the way this word gets used in Greek kind of pagan religious contexts, helasmos and elastarian language were sometimes used to describe propitiation.
00:35:54
Speaker
yeah So if one of the Greek pantheon of gods was mad, as they often seem to be, you would helaskatai them through sacrifice or give them an helasmos and their anger would be appeased. Yeah. To literally satisfy their wrath. They needed that blood to satisfy them.
00:36:09
Speaker
That's certainly language that a New Testament author could have used to communicate the idea clearly to their audience. However, in the New Testament, the object of this language, the thing that's actually getting affected by the helasmos or the elaskatai, is the sin itself or the sinner.
00:36:27
Speaker
So 1 John 2.2 says that Jesus is the elasterion for our sins. It doesn't say that he was an elasterion to God. That may seem like a minor difference, but the New Testament is actually consistent in the way it uses that language.
00:36:41
Speaker
It's also interesting to note that when scripture describes the reconciliation that occurs between man and God, it's always described as a change that happens to humanity. As opposed to God.
00:36:52
Speaker
Okay, so it doesn't describe God's attitude as having changed after he got a good blood meal or something like that. Right. That was maybe the language that was used by some of the pagan religions. Yeah, so if that was going to communicate propitiation, you would expect it to say that God was the object of the Elasmos or that God was the one who was reconciled to humanity. Ah, that's right. Yep, because you have angry God, now not angry God. Something happened to make him not angry. It was that sacrifice that satisfied him.
00:37:21
Speaker
You don't necessarily see it described that way in the New Testament. In Marvin Vincent's Word Studies in the New Testament, he comments, such phrases as propitiating God and God being reconciled are foreign to the language of the New Testament.
00:37:35
Speaker
Man is reconciled. There is a propitiation in the matter of the sin or of the sinner. I think this is interesting outside of the New Testament. Clement does use this type of language when he describes an ex-elasterion with respect to God.
00:37:50
Speaker
Ex-elasterion being? A form of this elas. Sure. In elasmos. Okay. When he uses this type of language with God as its object. In 1 Clement 7.7, he says, Jonah proclaimed destruction to the Ninevites, but they, repenting of their sins, propitiated God by prayer.
00:38:09
Speaker
and obtained salvation. Oh, so like God's mind was changed, God's attitude was changed by not sacrifice, but prayer. Yeah. Okay. So there is an obvious way to describe a propitiation to God, and Clement uses it, but he's explicit that it's a propitiation through prayer, not sacrifice.
00:38:28
Speaker
This is off topic, but I'm thinking of the many times in Second Temple literature where prayers, almsgiving, are viewed as sacrifice to God. It's an interesting connection at this point.
00:38:40
Speaker
Obviously, Clement, we don't consider that scripture, but it shows you how the New Testament authors could have used this sort of language if they wanted to describe something. They had the language available to them. This wouldn't have been a strange use, but they didn't. They consistently use Elosterion with sin or the sinner as its object rather than God.
00:38:57
Speaker
So there seems to be a way that they're describing this phenomenon differently than the Roman religions were describing this type of phenomenon. Exactly. This is kind of a big deal for the PSA theory.
00:39:10
Speaker
One of the key concepts is the idea that Jesus' sacrifice is propitiatory, satisfying the wrath of God. It's central to the logic of the whole system, but it rests heavily on specific interpretation of a few contested verses.
00:39:24
Speaker
This obviously doesn't prove that PSA is wrong. It just means that it's not a clear and explicit teaching of scripture. The early church writings don't have any clear expression of penal substitutionary atonement.
00:39:35
Speaker
Proponents of PSA will argue that there are elements of PSA described by the Church Fathers, passages that indicate some sort of satisfaction of God's divine character was in mind, but there wasn't any sort of a developed rational theory until Anselm came up with one.
00:39:50
Speaker
Yeah, certainly antselll may have been describing something that is true about the atonement that he learned from his cultural context, like his cultural context may have caused him to ask specific questions about the work of God and Jesus that are genuinely insightful. We can't write that off.
00:40:07
Speaker
However, I'm always nervous about making something like that central or dogmatic or saying it is a central teaching of Christianity. It's the same way I view dispensationalism.
00:40:20
Speaker
It's possible that there's something insightful about it But it's brand new. Someone came up with it in 1850. In a similar sort of way here, 1050 or 1850, I don't care. We're still talking about eons of time after Jesus and after his first followers.
00:40:38
Speaker
We're talking about post-Constantinian Christianity, post-imperial Christianity, So much has changed, it seems just arbitrary and random to go to Europe at some select period of time way after the fact and be like, ah, that's central to Christianity.
Unity and Dialogue in Atonement Discussions
00:40:55
Speaker
Again, I'm not saying it can't be part or there there's no insight being made there, but epistemologically, I'm just really uncomfortable with that move.
00:41:04
Speaker
Why think that Anselm was inspired by God with this theory to speak clearly about the atonement in a way that some other monk at some other time in some other place wasn't inspired to that degree?
00:41:17
Speaker
It just seems selective and arbitrary to me. Yeah. If Anselm really was rediscovering a truth that the biblical authors taught, but was missed by the church up until Anselm, you have to understand that all of the early readers of scripture, reading scripture in their own native language, missed this idea completely.
00:41:37
Speaker
It's just hard for me to think that early Christians missed the boat that badly on a teaching that needs to be so central to Christianity. Yeah. And lest I be accused here of like the fallacy here where you question a theory or question a proposition based on the source. So like I was saying, this is later. It's just in a spot in Europe. Why think that it has legitimacy? That's not an argument against it. That's not.
00:42:01
Speaker
I'm just describing my epistemic discomfort in saying this is central to Christianity. And so I guess that's my like appeal, I guess, for a little bit of unity on this topic, or at least to take the temperature down in the debate. Because if you're a strong, like reformed person, you love the tradition, you love to read your Puritans and all that good stuff. And I know a lot of evangelical Christians are, and that's that's really appealing to them for some reason. It's not to me, but it is to a lot of people.
00:42:28
Speaker
If that's like your home theologically, you like the beards and the beer and stuff like that. When it comes to PSA, that's going to be a central component of your theology. i already know it. All those people are teaching Calvin's expression of Anselm's theory.
00:42:42
Speaker
But I think it's unwise if you start to say things like the gospel means PSA or like you're not a faithful Christian if you don't believe PSA. You can't do that with intellectual honesty, i don't think, because then you're writing off literally just the way the early church talked about it. The entire Eastern church still talks about it.
00:43:02
Speaker
I'm not willing to do that. That seems too selective for me. This is a debate that's been going on for a while in scholarship, but I think it's just kind of starting to heat up on the popular level. So we're starting to see the ways that different evangelical leaders and institutions are going to approach how they handle this debate.
00:43:19
Speaker
So I expect we'll probably see a lot of organizations that will try to wall themselves off from it. They're going to discourage this discussion from occurring within their community. We may even see division and fracturing because of this discussion.
00:43:32
Speaker
I hope that we can engage this well and do so in a Jesus-like way, even where we disagree strongly. I hope that church history shows us that there have been Christians who sought to understand scripture and follow Jesus well, who've held to very different beliefs on this topic.
00:43:49
Speaker
I hope we can have the curiosity and the humility to engage this question honestly That our desire to understand Jesus would come before our desire to protect our traditions. If only.
00:44:00
Speaker
We are very good at prioritizing the protection of that which is comfortable to me in my community. The hierarchies of control I experience in my community.
00:44:18
Speaker
Now, in the five centuries of the Protestant church where penal substitutionary atonement has been taught and preached, it hasn't always been done so carefully. Sometimes it's been presented as a crude and inaccurate caricature of a theory.
00:44:33
Speaker
There are a lot of people who've attacked penal substitutionary atonement, and plenty of bad criticisms of it have been given as well. I get frustrated because I think there's an important conversation that Christians need to be having around this.
00:44:45
Speaker
But the bad caricatures and the bad criticisms around PSA can be a distraction that prevent people from engaging this conversation meaningfully. i actually think it's helpful to call out a few of the bad arguments that sidetrack this conversation.
00:44:58
Speaker
Because unfortunately, these are the ways that a lot of people will experience this debate first. If you spend your time with the YouTube apologists or theologians, you're probably going to hear a lot of bad faith debates.
00:45:10
Speaker
So one of the bad criticisms given of penal substitution atonement is that it depicts God as subject to the law, like he's limited or trapped by it. So like the thing that makes God appease God's wrath is this thing outside of himself called the law. Exactly.
00:45:27
Speaker
But as Thomas Schreiner notes, God's law describes his moral character. The moral norms of the law are not externally imposed on God. The norms of the law express God's character, the beauty and holiness of his person.
00:45:41
Speaker
Sin certainly involves the violation of God's law, but the violation of the law is so heinous because it constitutes rebellion against God's lordship. Those who transgress the law reject God's authority over their lives.
00:45:54
Speaker
It's not really correct to say that something acting according to its nature is limited by something external to itself, especially when we talk about theology or talk about God. It's more correct to talk about what God will always do is exactly what his nature is. And and on this theory, intrinsic to his nature is this component of retributive justice.
00:46:16
Speaker
Another criticism given of penal substitutionary atonement is that it divides the Trinity, depicting a loving Jesus as working to protect humanity from a wrathful God. Now, I think it's totally fair to question whether these teachings of PSA are biblical and even to disagree with their depiction of God, but I don't like when cheap caricatures are used.
00:46:36
Speaker
Thoughtful descriptions of PSA are careful to note that the work of atonement is accomplished as an act of love by both God the Father and Jesus.
Critiques of PSA and God’s Nature
00:46:44
Speaker
So while this theory teaches Jesus' suffering and death is God's wrath poured on his Son, there's no separation of the wills, no tearing apart of the Trinity.
00:46:54
Speaker
I don't want to slide into a cheap criticism here, but like I actually do personally struggle with this aspect of the theory, where if it's intrinsic to the Father's character that somebody pays the price, but God the Father doesn't pay the price, Jesus does, then it seems like we're saying that Jesus has a slightly different relationship to retributive justice, because in Jesus's case, it must be him that pays the price and not the Father that pays the price.
00:47:24
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's an open question. I'm not sure if that's a criticism. It's just like an oddity of the theory. i was just thinking about it today on a walk and I was like, I'm not sure how this really works. Yeah, I certainly don't understand all the nuance of it well.
00:47:37
Speaker
But good representations of the theory are very careful to note that God the Father and Jesus' wills were aligned. So in a sense, this is a sacrifice performed both by God the Father and Jesus.
00:47:49
Speaker
I guess you can just leave it at that. And that is satisfying. Like I said, I think it's totally fair to question these things and say, is this consistent with the God of the Bible?
00:47:59
Speaker
But sometimes this is presented just cheap and through a caricature as a way of trying to attack PSA, and that bothers me. So if we want to have the thoughtful debates about it I think that's great. But let's at least do it with the best representation of the theories.
00:48:13
Speaker
Now on the flip side, there are, I think, some bad criticisms made of Christus Victor theories by proponents of penal substitutionary atonement. A bad argument against Christus Victor is to claim that it teaches that God paid a ransom to the devil.
00:48:26
Speaker
Scripture says that Jesus gave his life as a ransom. Now, ransom in scriptural language could mean whatever was needed to help someone escape. It doesn't actually demand an object to whom the ransom is paid.
00:48:37
Speaker
And scripture doesn't give an object when describing Jesus as a ransom. Now, there are Christians who've asked and explored the question, was the ransom paid to the devil? Some even developed the idea that the devil was tricked into taking Jesus as a ransom payment.
00:48:52
Speaker
Didn't Athanasius talk this way? A lot of the early people did, yeah. God acting deceptively to trick the devil is theologically problematic, to say the least. Critics of the early church's victory-based atonement theories will sometimes treat this as if a ransom payment to the devil is simply a part of victory-based atonement.
00:49:11
Speaker
Just like the poor criticism of PSA would say, it entails divine child abuse. Exactly. So also this is an an unfair representation. Yeah. So sometimes they'll try to discredit early understandings of the atonement because of these ideas that some of these early Christians explored around a ransom being paid to the devil. Got it.
Non-Satisfaction Theories and Cosmic Sin
00:49:30
Speaker
Now, another accusation made against Christus Victor or other atonement theories, or really any atonement theory that isn't satisfaction-based, is that it's just an attempt to diminish the seriousness of sin.
00:49:42
Speaker
Now, satisfaction-based theories do emphasize sin as infraction against God's holy character, infraction that can't be forgiven without proper payment. So some satisfaction supporters will accuse any theory that claims God can forgive sins without payment of not taking sin seriously.
00:50:00
Speaker
Atonement theories like Christus Victor do understand sin differently. They emphasize sin's cosmic effects, its power to twist humanity into rebellious idolatry, and the way it brings the effects of death into every aspect of human existence.
00:50:14
Speaker
Yes, this doesn't emphasize the legal guilt of sin the same way, but I don't think it's right to suggest that it's a less serious way of viewing sin. Right. So what's something we could all agree on?
00:50:26
Speaker
Jesus saves us from our sin. And it's not always easy to know exactly how that works. That is true. So while Christus Victor doesn't understand sin exactly the same way, I hope it's clear that it certainly doesn't understand sin as being a less serious problem for humanity.
00:50:42
Speaker
Sure, so we would all agree that in some way, somehow, Jesus' life and death and resurrection provided a solution to the sin and death problem that was introduced by fallen humanity, by rebellious humanity.
00:50:58
Speaker
Somehow, in some way, a pathway toward reconciliation back to God was provided for in Jesus' work. That's something I hope we as Christians can all celebrate and seek to live it out, even while we may have these disagreements about how exactly all those mechanisms function.
Contrasting Views: Sin as Disease vs. Legalistic Views
00:51:16
Speaker
I hope that we can have those disagreements in a way that is still unifying and edifying and shows a new way of being humanity to the world. I can't argue with you there. Frederick Matthews Green describes the Eastern understanding of sin.
00:51:29
Speaker
Sin is infection, not infraction. It is an inward spreading disease of the soul, dealing death to all who partook of human nature. We need to be healed, and that can't be done by changing a label.
00:51:42
Speaker
Christ frees us just from the penalty of sin, but from sin itself. He began that process by stepping into the flow of human life.