The Actuality of Penal Substitution
The Actuality of Penal Substitution
While some might agree that God has the right to punish sinners with physical and spiritual death, that certain goods would be achieved by the exaction of such punishment that wouldn't otherwise be achieved, and that it is much the better that this good be achieved by a just transfer of the penal consequences to Christ on the cross than that human persons suffer these consequences, it may nonetheless be questioned whether this is what was actually going on in the historical crucifixion of Christ. It bears repeating that this is where the biblical evidence is crucial. Given the moral coherence of penal substitution, does Scripture indicate that such a transaction is taking place in Christ's suffering and death? While I am sympathetic to the biblical arguments in support of penal substitution, here I would like to explore a slightly different argument for the actuality of penal substitution.
The argument can be put as follows:
Therefore, the doctrine of penal substitution is the only adequate explanation of Christ's voluntary death on the cross.
Let us turn to a consideration of these premises. First, I take it that premise 1, Christ voluntarily died on the cross, is rightfully assumed by all who accept that Jesus was God incarnate. Christ sets his face to Jerusalem and does not attempt to escape His death when He was obviously able to do so (Matt 16:21). Indeed, in the garden of Gethsemane, we see that both Christ and His heavenly Father see the cross (“the cup”) as ultimately unavoidable (Luke 22:42).19 Now presumably the cross was avoidable in all sorts of ways. Christ could have ascended into the heavens prior to His execution. He could have mysteriously slipped away from the soldiers as He had from other violent crowds in the past. By His own admission, He could have brought His rule and reign into the present with overwhelming authority and power (Matt 26:53). But He doesn't. The question is, Why does He voluntarily go to His death?
One thing we know for sure is that He must have had a good reason. Premise 2 is a specification of the more general claim that it is either foolish or suicidal to die voluntarily unless there is some great good that can only or best be accomplished by voluntarily dying. We think it either foolish or suicidal when a person jumps in front of a speeding train proclaiming love for a friend. Unless, of course, the friend (or someone else) is in front of the speeding train and jumping in front of the train was the only way to save that person. To offer a different example, if we find out the moral reformer knew the gunman was lying in wait and that she could have easily avoided the bullets but instead wanted to go down in a dramatic fashion, the reformer's death loses its meaning. By all means, stay alive if you can, unless going to your death is the only or best way to accomplish some great good. So too, Christ must have had a great good in mind that could only or best be accomplished by voluntarily dying. Surely His death was not suicidal or foolish.
And yet, what could that great good be that could not be accomplished in a less costly manner? The third premise claims: Any great good one might suggest for Christ's death besides vicarious punishment seems to be of the kind that could have been accomplished without His death.
Now setting forth an exhaustive listing of all possible reasons for Christ's voluntarily death is impossible, but examining a few prominent suggestions will make the point. For instance, some propose that Christ went to His death because it was the natural consequence of a perfect human life lived in an imperfect world. Since Christ freely went to His death, the idea becomes that for Him to avoid the likely outcome of His incarnate existence would have been to take the easy way out. The problem here is that while a perfect human in an imperfect world will be regularly threatened with violence, this does not seem to be an adequate reason to allow oneself to be killed. This is akin to a political reformer's allowing himself to be assassinated by his opposition because “they will kill me eventually so I will go along with their murderous plot.” No, the reformer should stay alive as long as possible, dodging bullets if need be, and if the reformer had it within his power to avoid death altogether, that would be the better. We would never call the reformer who seeks to avoid his likely death a coward, so why think that it would be cowardly for Christ to avoid His likely death? All of this to say: if there wasn't some other reason why Christ should lay down His life, violent death being the natural outcome of a perfect human life seems insufficient.
But what about the great good of the resurrection? Christ's death is obviously a necessary condition for His resurrection. The idea here seems to be that the only way for Christ to have demonstrated His power over death was for Him to be resurrected from the dead and so this justifies His voluntary submission to the cross. But could not Christ have shown His power over death by raising numerous others, like Lazarus, from the dead? There seems to be no question among those who witnessed Christ's resurrecting others that He had power over death (e.g. John 12:10–11,17–19). While the demonstration of Christ's resurrection power is a great good, it does not appear that it is only or best achieved through Christ's own voluntary death. There are less costly ways for Christ to make His power equally well-known.
Nonetheless, if Christ Himself had not died and risen again, not as much attention would have been drawn to His message, or His message would not have been authenticated. No doubt the resurrection did accomplish both of these great goods, but the question is whether this would have been sufficient reason for Christ voluntarily to lay down His life. It seems incumbent on Christ to draw attention to and authenticate His message without voluntarily dying if that were feasible. Once again, do we admire the activist who draws attention to his cause by being an accomplice in his own death when there are other means of drawing equal attention that do not involve his death? It seems that for Christ there were other means. For instance, if Christ had ascended into the heavens right off of Golgotha, that surely would have created a stir. He could have returned after His precrucifixion ascension in much the same way as the Gospels record His postresurrection appearances. Certainly such an ascension and reappearance (while not quite a death and resurrection) would have caused Christ to stand out and would have clearly authenticated His divine status. Since these goods could be achieved in a manner that avoided Christ's death, the goodness and wisdom of His voluntary death is left unexplained.
Another possibility is that the cross shows us that the way of Christ is the way of humility, death to self, and nonviolence.20 We see on the cross that when God could have struck back, He did not. But once again we can have our cake and eat it too, for certainly Christ's teachings and life prior to the cross amply testify to His way of humility, death to self, and nonviolence (e.g. Matt 5:38–42). If we found that a moral reformer voluntarily submitted to her violent death when she could have avoided it in order to drive home these lessons, we would question the wisdom of that reformer. In other words, we could take Christ's death out of His incarnate life and still have a clear example of His way of humility, death to self, and nonviolence. Certainly His death adds something to His modeling a spirituality of descent, but if this were the only reason voluntarily to lay down one's life, it does not appear to be sufficient.
One might think that all of the above and much more are accomplished via the cross, but no matter what is offered, the general response will still hold. For whatever reason is proposed as the justifying reason for Christ's voluntary death, the response will be: that could have been accomplished equally well without a violent death. Therefore, for Christ voluntarily to lay down His life was either suicidal or foolish. In other words: (3) Any great good one might suggest for Christ's death besides vicarious punishment seems to be of the kind that could have been accomplished without His death.
Surely Christ's death was neither suicidal nor foolish, so He must have had a justifying reason to choose the cross. But the only reason we regularly accept as justifying a voluntary death is that by so dying one or more other human lives are spared: the person who jumps on the grenade to save others, the person who goes through a risky surgery to donate an organ that someone else needs to live, the person who accepts a dangerous mission knowing that death is likely in order to save many others from harm. These examples are neither suicidal nor foolish but rather move us deeply when we hear of them. Truly, “no one has greater love than this, that someone would lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13 HCSB). Though, as has been shown, such sacrificial love is only authentically loving when by laying down your life your friends are thereby enabled to live.
The doctrine of penal substitution meets this condition. It explains Christ's voluntary death by claiming that the only or best way to save human lives from physical and spiritual death is for that physical and spiritual death to be taken on by the person of Christ: (4) The one great good that can only or best be accomplished by Christ's voluntary death on the cross is that by so doing He took on the physical and spiritual death due human sinners.
The only great good that can justify a voluntary death is if that death saves other lives, and the only theory of the atonement that makes sense of why the death of Jesus would save other lives is the theory of penal substitution. So the argument draws us to the conclusion that penal substitution is the only adequate explanation of why Christ would have voluntarily gone to the cross.