Inter-Varsity Press

CONTENTS

Foreword

The authors

PART ONE: MAKING THE CASE

1. Introduction
Setting the scene
Responding to the challenge

2. Searching the Scriptures: the biblical foundations of penal substitution
Introduction
Exodus 12
Leviticus 18
Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12
The Gospel of Mark
The Gospel of John
Romans
Galatians 3:10-13
1 Peter 2:21-25 and 3:18
Conclusion

3. Assembling the pieces: the theological framework for penal substitution
Setting the scene
Creation
‘Decreation’ – the undoing of creation
The consequences of sin
Truth, goodness, justice and salvation
Relationships within the Trinity
Redemption
Conclusion

4. Exploring the implications: the pastoral importance of penal substitution
Introduction
Assurance of God’s love
Confidence in God’s truthfulness
Passion for God’s justice
Realism about our sin

5. Surveying the heritage: the historical pedigree of penal substitution
Introduction: Why bother with church history?
Justin Martyr (c. 100-165)
Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 275–339)
Hilary of Poitiers (c. 300–368)
Athanasius (c. 300-373)
Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 330-390)
Ambrose of Milan (339-397)
John Chrysostom (c. 350-397)
Augustine of Hippo (354-430)
Cyril of Alexandria (375-444)
Gelasius of Cyzicus (fifth century)
Gregory the Great (c. 540-604)
Thomas Aquinas (c. 125-1274)
John Calvin (1509-64)
Francis Turretin (1623-87)
John Bunyan (1628-88)
John Owen (1616-85)
George Whitefield (1714-70)
Charles H. Spurgeon (1834-92)
D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981)
John R. W. Stott (born 1921)
J. I. Packer (born 1926)
The Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship (UCCF) Doctrinal Basis
The Evangelical Alliance Basis of Faith
Conclusion

PART TWO: ANSWERING THE CRITICS

6. Introduction to the debate
Setting the scene
Our approach
Why do it this way?

7. Penal substitution and the Bible
Introduction
1. ‘Penal substitution is not the only model of the atonement’
2. ‘Penal substitution is not central to the atonement’
3. ‘Penal substitution diminishes the significance of Jesus’ life and resurrection’
4. ‘Penal substitution is not taught in the Bible’
5. ‘Penal substitution is not important enough to be a source of division’

8. Penal substitution and culture
Introduction
1. ‘Penal substitution is the product of human culture, not biblical teaching’
2. ‘Penal substitution is unable to address the real needs of human culture’
3. ‘Penal substitution relies on biblical words, metaphors and concepts that are outdated and misunderstood in our culture’

9. Penal substitution and violence
Introduction
1. ‘Penal substitution rests on unbiblical ideas of sacrifice’
2. ‘The violence involved in penal substitution amounts to “cosmic child abuse”’
3. ‘The retributive violence involved in penal substitution contradicts Jesus’ message of peace and love’
4. ‘The violence inherent in penal substitution is an example of “the myth of redemptive violence”, which can never overcome evil’

10. Penal substitution and justice
Introduction
1. ‘It is unjust to punish an innocent person, even if he is willing to be punished’
2. ‘Biblical justice is about restoring relationships, not exacting retribution’
3. ‘Penal substitution implicitly denies that God forgives sin’
4. ‘Penal substitution does not work, for the penalty Christ suffered was not equivalent to that due to us’
5. ‘Penal substitution implies universal salvation, which is unbiblical’

11. Penal substitution and our understanding of God
Introduction
1. ‘Penal substitution implies a division between the persons of the Trinity’
2. ‘Penal substitution relies on an unbiblical view of an angry God that is incompatible with his love’
3. ‘Penal substitution misunderstands the relationship between God’s wrath and human sin’
4. ‘Penal substitution generates an unbiblical view of a God constrained by a law external to himself’
5. ‘Penal substitution is an impersonal, mechanistic account of the atonement’

12. Penal substitution and the Christian life
Introduction
1. ‘Penal substitution fails to address the issues of political and social sin and cosmic evil’
2. ‘Penal substitution is an entirely objective account of the atonement, and fails to address our side of the Creator–creature relationship’
3. ‘Penal substitution causes people to live in fear of God’
4. ‘Penal substitution legitimates violence and encourages the passive acceptance of unjust suffering’

13. A final word
Introduction
‘The Vague Objection’
‘The Emotional Objection’
Conclusion

Appendix: A personal note to preachers
Introduction
Exploring the problem
Addressing the problem

FOREWORD
Out of the Jewish leadership of Jesus’ day had risen teachers of the law who did not know what the law meant. Jesus found himself saying things like ‘Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things?’ ( John 3:10 ESV). Some of the teachers had lost all sense of biblical proportion, ‘straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!’ (Matt 23:24 ESV). And as they lost their bearings, they came under Jesus’ most serious charge: ‘You have made void the word of God’ (Matt 15:6 ESV).

Emotionally, Jesus’ response was a sinless combination of grief and anger. ‘He looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart’ (Mark 3:5 ESV). Why both anger and grief? The anger was because people were being hurt – eternally. These teachers were supposed to know what the word of God meant, but instead Jesus said they were ‘like unmarked graves, and people walk over them without knowing it’ (Luke 11:44 ESV). This made Jesus angry. Their job was to teach what God had said. Instead, they were blind guides and were leading others with them into the ditch. Jesus loved people. Therefore, he was angry with professional teachers who imperilled people with biblical blunders.

But Jesus was not only angry; he was ‘grieved at their hardness of heart’. These were his kinsmen. These were the leaders of his people.

These were the representatives of the Jerusalem he loved and wept over. ‘Would that you . . . had known . . . the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes’ (Luke 19:42 ESV). The condition of their heart and the blindness of their eyes were a grief to Jesus.

This is how I feel today about teachers of Christ’s people who deny and even belittle precious, life-saving, biblical truth.When a person says that God’s ‘punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed’ would be as evil as child abuse, I am angered and grieved. For if God did not punish his Son in my place, I am not saved from my greatest peril, the wrath of God.

In part, I write this foreword to defend my Father’s wrath against me before I was adopted. He does not need my defence. But I believe he would be honoured by it. On behalf of my Father, then, I would like to bear witness to the truth that, before he adopted me, his terrible wrath rested upon me. Jesus said, ‘Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey . . . the wrath of God remains on him’ (John 3:36 ESV; italics added). Wrath remains on us as long as there is no faith in Jesus.

Paul puts it like this: We ‘were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind’ (Eph. 2:3 ESV). My very nature made me worthy of wrath. My destiny was to endure ‘flaming fire’ and ‘vengeance on those . . . who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus . . . (and who) suffer the punishment of eternal destruction’ (2 Thess. 1:8-9 ESV). I was not a son of God. God was not my Father. He was my judge and executioner. I was ‘dead in . . . trespasses and sins’, one of the ‘sons of disobedience’ (Eph. 2:1-2 ESV). And the sentence of my Judge was clear and terrifying: ‘because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience’ (Eph. 5:6 ESV; italics added).

There was only one hope for me – that the infinite wisdom of God might make a way for the love of God to satisfy the wrath of God so that I might become a son of God.

This is exactly what happened, and I will sing of it forever. After saying that I was by nature a child of wrath, Paul says, ‘But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ’ (Eph. 2:4-5 ESV). What a grievous blindness when a teacher in the church writes that the term ‘children of wrath’ cannot mean ‘actual objects of God’s wrath . . . (because) in the same breath they are described as at the same time objects of God’s love’. On the contrary. This is the very triumph of the love of God. This is the love of God – the ‘great love with which he loved us’. It rescued me from his wrath and adopted me into sonship.

‘But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son . . . to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons’ (Gal. 4:4 ESV). God sent his Son to rescue me from his wrath and make me his child.

How did he do it? He did it in the way one writer slanderously calls ‘cosmic child abuse’. God’s Son bore God’s curse in my place. ‘Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us – for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”’ (Gal. 3:13 ESV; italics added). If people in the twenty-first century find this greatest act of love ‘morally dubious and a huge barrier to faith’, it was not different in Paul’s day. ‘We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles’ (1 Cor. 1:23 ESV; italics added).

But for those who are called by God and believe in Jesus, this is ‘the power of God and the wisdom of God’ (1 Cor. 1:24 ESV). This is my life. This is the only way God could become my Father.Now that his wrath no longer rests on me (John 3:36), he has sent the Spirit of sonship flooding into my heart crying Abba, Father (Rom. 8:15). I thank you, heavenly Father, with all my heart, that you saved me from your wrath. I rejoice to measure your love for me by the magnitude of the wrath I deserved and the wonder of your mercy by putting Christ in my place.

Those who try to rescue the love of God by minimizing the wrath of God, undermine not only the love of God, but also his demand that we love our enemies. It is breathtaking to hear one of them say, ‘If the cross is a personal act of violence perpetrated by God towards humankind but borne by his Son, then it makes a mockery of Jesus’ own teaching to love your enemies, and to refuse to repay evil with evil.’ Those are deadly words, which, if they held sway, would take enemy love out of the world.

Why? Because Paul said that counting on the final wrath of God against his enemies is one of the crucial warrants for why we may not return evil for evil. It is precisely because we may trust the wisdom of God to apply his wrath justly that we must leave all vengeance to him and return good for evil. ‘Never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him”’ (Rom. 12: 19-20 ESV). If God does not show wrath, sooner or later we shall take justice into our own hands. But God says, ‘Don’t. I will see to it.’

Every section of this book yields another reason to thank God for the labours of the authors and for IVP in Britain. I pray that the Lord will give the book success in the defence and honour of God, and that Jesus Christ will be treasured all the more fully when he is seen more clearly to be Pierced for our Transgressions.

John Piper

Pastor for Preaching and Vision
Bethlehem Baptist Church
Minneapolis, Minnesota

Part One: Making the Case

Extract from ... 1. INTRODUCTION

Setting the scene

The doctrine of penal substitution states that God gave himself in the person of his Son to suffer instead of us the death, punishment and curse due to fallen humanity as the penalty for sin.

This understanding of the cross of Christ stands at the very heart of the gospel. There is a captivating beauty in the sacrificial love of a God who gave himself for his people. It is this that first draws many believers to the Lord Jesus Christ, and this that will draw us to him when he returns on the last day to vindicate his name and welcome his people into his eternal kingdom. That the Lord Jesus Christ died for us – a shameful death, bearing our curse, enduring our pain, suffering the wrath of his own Father in our place – has been the wellspring of the hope of countless Christians throughout the ages.

It is therefore unsurprising that many have been deeply troubled in recent years to hear dissenting voices raised against this teaching. We fear that Christ will be robbed of his glory, that believers will be robbed of their assurance and that preachers will be robbed of their confidence in ‘the old, old story’ of the life-transforming power of the cross of Christ. The great Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon foresaw the devastating consequences of losing penal substitution well over a century ago, in a sermon that now takes on an eerily prophetic tone:

"If ever there should come a wretched day when all our pulpits shall be full of modern thought, and the old doctrine of a substitutionary sacrifice shall be exploded, then will there remain no word of comfort for the guilty or hope for the despairing. Hushed will be for ever those silver notes which now console the living, and cheer the dying; a dumb spirit will possess this sullen world, and no voice of joy will break the blank silence of despair. The gospel speaks through the propitiation for sin, and if that be denied, it speaketh no more. Those who preach not the atonement exhibit a dumb and dummy gospel; a mouth it hath, but speaketh not; they that make it are like unto their idol . . .

"Would you have me silence the doctrine of the blood of sprinkling? Would any one of you attempt so horrible a deed? Shall we be censured if we continually proclaim the heaven-sent message of the blood of Jesus? Shall we speak with bated breath because some affected person shudders at the sound of the word ‘blood’? or some ‘cultured’ individual rebels at the old-fashioned thought of sacrifice? Nay, verily, we will sooner have our tongue cut out than cease to speak of the precious blood of Jesus Christ."

Mercifully, that ‘wretched day’ has not quite arrived – at least not yet. For ‘the old doctrine of a substitutionary sacrifice’ has not been exploded’; it is still preached faithfully and fervently in churches all over the world. However, an increasing number of theologians and church leaders are calling it into question.

Where did these dissenting voices come from? Many of them can be traced to the rise of liberal theology in the middle of the nineteenth century. Liberalism had little time for the motifs of sacrifice, divine wrath and propitiation entailed in penal substitution. As Henri Blocher observes, ‘Liberal Protestants . . . felt outraged at the doctrine and complained about a “blood” theology, in their eyes an ugly relic of primitive stages in man’s religious evolution.’

During the decades that followed, various alternative accounts of the atonement emerged, none of which left room for penal substitution, and some of which explicitly attacked it. ...

In one sense, it is no surprise that the Bible’s teaching should be criticized in this way, for foundational truths of the Christian faith
always come under attack from time to time – witness the debates that have raged in the past over the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the bodily resurrection, and so on. The apostle Paul warned that ‘the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear’ (2 Tim. 4:3).

The more disturbing thing is that some of the more recent critics of penal substitution regard themselves as evangelicals, and claim to be committed to the authority of Scripture. Moreover, whereas criticism of penal substitution was once confined largely to academic books and journals, it has now found its way into popular Christian books and magazines, creating confusion and alarm among Christians.

One of the most significant books of this kind is The Lost Message of Jesus by Steve Chalke and Alan Mann (2003). Although not written explicitly as a critique of penal substitution, its description of the doctrine as ‘a form of cosmic child abuse’10 provoked considerable disquiet, not least because Steve Chalke is well known as the founding director of the Oasis Trust and a contributor to several popular Christian magazines. The Evangelical Alliance (EA) responded to the controversy by hosting a public debate in London in October 2004, attended by hundreds of Christians from both sides of the dispute. Both positions were aired but with little resolution. The following summer, the EA organized a symposium at the London School of Theology, attended by over a hundred evangelical scholars, pastors and laypeople. The EA’s own research showed that the vast majority of those present affirmed penal substitution, but the controversy remains firmly on the evangelical agenda, and shows no sign of receding. ...

In short, after rumbling away for a century and a half behind the closed doors of the liberal scholarly academy, criticisms of penal substitution have recently been voiced by several influential evangelical theologians and church leaders, provoking a storm of controversy within the Christian community.

Responding to the challenge

Of course, advocates of penal substitution have not been silent during this time. Many have written in defence of the doctrine and the biblical and theological framework that underpins it.

One of the most significant contributions came from the pen of Leon Morris. ...

... Unfortunately, Morris’s writings have not had the impact they deserve, because critics of his position paid little attention. Indeed, one of the strangest things about modern challenges to penal substitution is the extent to which they continue to rely on interpretations of Scripture soundly refuted by Morris decades ago, without even attempting to reply to his case....

In view of all this material in support of penal substitution, one might reasonably ask whether another book is necessary. If the answers are all out there, why add yet another volume to the pile? This one is distinct in several ways. First, it seeks to bring together in one place a detailed examination of the key biblical passages, a consideration of the important theological and doctrinal issues, and a comprehensive survey of the teaching of the Christian church through the ages.

Secondly, while there are now some very helpful introductory books ... and some formidable academic essays, there is little in between. ...

But the most pressing reason why this book is necessary is that the misconceived criticisms of penal substitution show no sign of
abating, and the resulting confusion within the Christian community seems to be increasing rather than decreasing. As Carl Trueman remarked, ‘The classical evangelical position on atonement has fallen out of favour over recent years, often rejected on the basis of a theologically caricatured and historically inadequate understanding of what exactly the position entails.’ ...