PENAL SUBSTITUTION: Systematizing the Deception

It is not by accident that penal substitution has gained such prominence in Protestant Christianity. It has succeeded in systematizing the deception (Eph. 4:14) that God’s penal justice could actually somehow bring salvation, while it completely suppressed the voice of God’s premial justice that constitutes the authentic golden thread of divine salvation throughout wholesome Scripture. How the boa constrictor of Calvin’s rigorously novel theory of penal substitution could have strangled the Pauline proclamation of God’s resurrectionary justice toward the Lord Jesus can perhaps only be accounted for by the power of the sinful fleshly impulse toward personal avenging in combination with steady steps of systematic rationalizations that undermined sound exegetical treatments of key passages, all while cross-wiring them in new patterns that were both more amenable to fleshly dispositions of mind, less challenging to faith in a God of miracles, less demanding of obedience to the directives of the Lord Jesus, and less inclined to the example of his obedience to the death of a cross. Jesus became a weak substitute rather than a mighty Lord and a commanding Leader. [6/8/11;5/17/24]

God’s surrender of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, was not as a payment of our human debt of sin; if anything, IT ENORMOUSLY AGGRAVATED THE DEBT! IT SWELLED THE SIN OF ISRAEL TO THE BURSTING POINT! If there was any possible hope for Israel to make payment for her many sins (especially of slaying the prophets), by her own righteous deeds, it was utterly BANKRUPTED and totally demolished by the summum malum of CRUCIFYING JESUS! This was not a “deposit” into their “heavenly account” but a massive OVERDRAFT!

The direct implication of this stark fact is that God’s plan for the salvation of Israel, indeed, of all humankind, entailed and demanded THE MOST PATENTLY OBVIOUS DEBT FORGIVENESS EVER UNDERTAKEN IN HISTORY! (And we, in turn, are to forgive as our heavenly Father has thus forgiven us!) The Cross was the last straw; so little did this crime “pay off” God’s penal justice for any human sins (whether of “the elect” or the whole world) that, to the contrary, it greatly compounded human sin, yet happily evoked God’s own personal REPAYMENT to Jesus for his colossal loss. This is the astonishing way the Gospel actually works, contrary to the longstanding but novel traditions of the ‘magisterial’ Protestant Reformation. [6/8/11; 5/17/24]

Penal substitution THROWS STUMBLING BLOCKS AND SNARES BEFORE PEOPLE, thus injuring faith and the credibility of the Message about Jesus Christ. In particular, it is subversive of the character of God the Father. It perversely rationalizes the Atonement according to a strictly penal model that is inherently and irremediably offensive. With excruciating irony, the penal satisfaction accounting of the assassination of God the Son amounts to a character assassination of God the Father, unintentional though it always appears to be. [6/10/11; 5/17/24]

“GOD IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SATISFY, BUT EASY TO PLEASE.” — George MacDonald, quoted in Jan Karon, In the Company of Others (New York: J. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2010).

The historic record of God’s justice to Jesus is what creates the trust that conciliates hesitant sinners to Them; thereupon God sends them His Holy Spirit with assorted powers to corroborate the truth with gracious tokens of Their love. SWEET!!!

“And for the lamb he shall pay fourfold [LXX, sevenfold], because he did this thing, and since he had no pity!” 2 Samuel 11:6.

This prophetic exposure of David’s sin with Bathsheba (“sheba” also meaning “seven”) is “[i]n keeping with the law in Exodus 21:37.” *

*Everett Fox, Give Us a King!: Samuel, Saul, and David. A new translation of Samuel I and II with an introduction and notes by Everett Fox. New York: Schocken Books, 1999, p. 203, note 6. [3/16/11]

Everything we get by believing the Gospel is ipso facto accounted to faith. Therefore, because we receive the Holy Spirit when we believe, that is, the dispensing of the righteousness of the New Covenant (2 Corinthians 3:7-9) in Christ’s blood (Hebrews 13:20), then that righteousness is reckoned or imputed to us as we believe (Romans 4). In this marvelous way, God honors our simple faith in His own proclamation about His Son’s suffering abuse on our behalf, since faith is nothing in itself, but is dependent (is dependence!) upon external testimony and proof for its very existence. [3/17/11]

The spirit of Calvinism, insofar as it is distinguished from other streams of Christianity, tends to be uniquely punitive, joyless, smug, and abusive. Those (among other) destabilizing qualities and traits are, I would suggest, inseparable reflexes of the penal satisfaction theory of the Atonement and are well (if only partially) summarized by the Five Points of Calvinism that constitute key points where it hardened up against the gentle corrective attempts of Jacob Arminius, who otherwise, it should be emphasized, had no special bone to pick with Calvinism (as represented in Calvin’s own writings, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Belgic Confession). Insofar as the offending theory is radically false, the spirit of Calvinism is, by reflex, an evil spirit and produces evil fruits that battle against the fruits of the Spirit, good intentions to the contrary notwithstanding. Since Calvinism early became callused against the gentle discipline of Arminius it has repeatedly churned out attitudes contradictory to the authentic graciousness of God for Christ’s sake. Once the penal substitution theory is effectively overthrown by premial restitution, all Five Points must fall like dominoes, and attitudes will morph accordingly. [3/18/11; 4/17/24]

It is difficult to read Hugo Grotius’s refutation of Faustus Socinus’s critique of satisfaction theories of the Atonement without the growing conviction that he is all too often merely quibbling and captious. (See Robert S. Franks, A History of the Doctrine of the Work of Christ. [Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2001]; reprint of A Historical Study of Christian Doctrine [Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1962]), pp. 389-409). He ‘divides and conquers’ by splitting hairs and neglecting the basic thrust of Socinus’s treatment, and before long takes to swallowing camels. [3/18/11]

God does not “demand” faith from us, which we somehow have to “work up.” Much rather, He gives testimony, i.e., proof by way of eyewitness reports by credible observers concerning His own historic interventions on behalf of His beleaguered Son, AND THIS HISTORICAL RECORD ITSELF GENERATES FAITH IN THOSE WHO HEAR, EVEN IN SPITE OF THEMSELVES. ONLY PROOF, TESTIMONY, EVIDENCE, etc. HAVE SUCH POWER TO CREATE FAITH. So, believing, at bottom, is not itself the problem here. God has invested much that is necessary to induce faith within sin-darkened hearts between the covers of the Bible. Furthermore, He has followed up with signs, miracles, healings, and other powerful interventions before the eyes of every generation since then as additional corroboration. So if people do not trust Him upon reading/hearing such a well-attested (not to add Spirit-inspired) Story and observing the powers of God’s impending Kingdom in their midst, it is not for lack of these fiducial requisites (although, to be sure, the latter are too often in meager supply due to the inroads of cessationist theories among our teachers). Rather, it is because they love the darkness rather than the Light for their acts are vicious” (John 3:19), hence they are hating the Light lest their acts get exposed and they get put to shame.

All this means that the necessary condition of faith in order to be saved is no high-handed, arbitrary, harsh “demand,” as it were, to make “bricks without straw,” nor is it (as Calvinistic doctrine is wont to insist) “impossible without the gift of the Holy Spirit to make it effectual in the elect.” For the Gospel itself, the resurrectionary Explanation for the cross, the Proclamation of Christ, is itself the power of our salvation, which, when believed, is THEREUPON further corroborated by an empirical outpouring of the Holy Spirit to immerse and embrace us in a fuller consciousness and enjoyment of salvation’s reality by actual experience. This all amounts to an exhibit of “graciousness [in the outpoured Spirit] in exchange for graciousness [in the Reasoning of the Gospel]”—the fruit of spiritually examining the favors God is making ready for us via the Spiritual words He has matched them with in Scripture (1 Corinthians 2:9-16). [3/18/11; 4/17/24]