IV. Penal Substitution
IV. PENAL SUBSTITUTION
Now we move to the second stage in our model-building, and bring in the word 'penal' to characterize the substitution we have in view. To add this 'qualifier', as Ramsey would call it, is to anchor the model of substitution (not exclusively, but regulatively) within the world of moral law, guilty conscience, and retributive justice. Thus is forged a conceptual instrument for conveying the thought that God remits our sins and accepts our persons into favour not because of any amends we have attempted, but because the penalty which was our due was diverted on to Christ. The notion which the phrase 'penal substitution' expresses is that Jesus Christ our Lord, moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us, endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgment for which we were otherwise inescapably destined, and so won us forgiveness, adoption and glory. To affirm penal substitution is to say that believers are in debt to Christ specifically for this, and that this is the mainspring of all their joy, peace and praise both now and for eternity.
The general thought is clear enough, but for our present purpose we need a fuller analysis of its meaning, and here a methodological choice must be made, Should we appeal to particular existing accounts of penal substitution, or construct a composite of our own? At the risk of seeming idiosyncratic (which is, I suppose, the gentleman's way of saying unsound) I plump for the latter course, for the following main reasons.
First, there is no denying that penal substitution sometimes has been, and still sometimes is, asserted in ways which merit the favourite adjective of its critics — 'crude'. As one would expect of that which for more than four centuries has been the mainspring of evangelical piety — 'popular piety', as Roman Catholics would call it — ways of presenting it have grown up which are devotionally evocative without always being theologically rigorous. Moreover, the more theological expositions of it since Socinus have tended to be one-track-minded; constricted in interest by the preoccupations of controversy, and absorbed in the task of proclaiming the one vital truth about the cross which others disregarded or denied, 'upholders of the penal theory have sometimes so stressed the thought that Christ bore our penalty that they have found room for nothing else. Rarely have they in theory denied the value of other theories, but sometimes they have in practice ignored them.'25 Also, as we have seen, much of the more formative and influential discussing of penal substitution was done in the seventeenth century, at a time when Protestant exegesis of Scripture was coloured by an uncriticized and indeed unrecognized natural theology of law, and this has left its mark on many later statements. All this, being so, it might be hard to find an account of penal substitution which could safely be taken as standard or as fully representative, and it will certainly be more straight-forward if I venture an analysis of my own.
Second, I have already hinted that I think it important for the theory of penal substitution to be evaluated as a model setting forth the meaning of the atonement rather than its mechanics. One result of the work of rationalistic Protestant theologians over three centuries, from the Socinians to the Hegelians, was to nourish the now common assumption that the logical function of a 'theory' in theology is to resolve 'how' problems within an established frame of thought about God and man. In other words, theological theories are like detectives' theories in whodunits; they are hypotheses relating puzzling facts together in such a way that all puzzlement is dispelled (for the convention of 'mystery stories' is that by the last page no mystery should be felt to remain). Now we have seen that, for discernible historical reasons, penal substitution has sometimes been explicated as a theory of this kind, telling us how divine love and justice could be, and were, 'reconciled' (whatever that means); but a doubt remains as to whether this way of understanding the theme is biblically right. Is the harmonization of God's attributes any part of the information, or is it even the kind of information, that the inspired writers are concerned to give? Gustaf Aulén characterized the 'Christus victor' motif (he would not call it a theory) as a dramatic idea of the atonement rather than a rationale of its mechanics, and contrasted it in this respect with the 'Latin' view, of which penal substitution is one form;26 but should not penal substitution equally be understood as a dramatic idea, declaring the fact of the atonement kergymatically, i.e. as gospel (good news), just as Aulén's conquest-motif is concerned to do? I believe it should. Surely the primary issue with which penal substitution is concerned is neither the morality nor the rationality of God's ways, but the remission of my sins; and the primary function of the concept is to correlate my knowledge of being guilty before God with my knowledge that, on the one hand, no question of my ever being judged for my sins can now arise, and, on the other hand, that the risen Christ whom I am called to accept as Lord is none other than Jesus, who secured my immunity from judgment by bearing on the cross the penalty which was my due. The effect of this correlation is not in any sense to 'solve' or dissipate the, mystery of the work of God (it is not that sort of mystery!); the effect is simply to define that work with precision, and thus to evoke faith, hope, praise and responsive love to Jesus Christ. So, at least, I think, and therefore I wish my presentation of penal substitution to highlight its character as a kergymatic model; and so I think it best to offer my own analytical definition, which will aim to be both descriptive of what all who have held this view had had in common, and also prescriptive of how the term should be understood in any future discussion.
Third, if the present examination of penal substitution is to be worth while it must present this view in its best light, and I think an eclectic exposition will bring us closest to this goal. The typical modern criticism of older expositions of our theme is that, over and above their being less than fully moral (Socinus' criticism), they are less than fully personal. Thus, for instance, C.W.H. Lampe rejects penal substitution because it assumes that 'God inflicts retributive punishment', and 'retribution is impersonal; it considers offences in the 'abstract ... we ought not to ascribe purely retributive justice to God ... the Father of mankind does not deal with his children on the basis of deterrence and retribution ... to hang the criminal is to admit defeat at the level of love... . It is high time to discard the vestiges of a theory of Atonement that was geared to a conception of punishment which found nothing shocking in the idea that God should crucify sinners or the substitute who took their place. It is time, too, to stop the mouth of the blasphemer who calls it "sentimentality" to reject the idea of a God of retribution.'27 Lampe's violent language shows the strength of his conviction that retribution belongs to a sub-personal, non-loving order of relationships, and that penal substitution dishonours the cross by anchoring it here.
James Denney's sense of the contrast between personal relations, which are moral, and legal relations, which tend to be impersonal, external and arbitrary, once drew from him an outburst which in isolation might seem parallel to Lampe's. 'Few things have astonished me more' (he wrote) 'than to be charged with teaching a "forensic" or "legal" or "judicial' doctrine of Atonement... . There is nothing that I should wish to reprobate more whole-heartedly than the conception which is expressed by these words. To say that the relations of God and man are forensic is to say that they are regulated by statute — that sin is a breach of statute — that the sinner is a criminal — and that God adjudicates on him by interpreting the statute in its application to his case. Everybody knows that this is a travesty of the truth.'28 It is noticeable that Denney, the champion of the substitutionary idea, never calls Christ's substitution 'penal'; in his situation, the avoidance must have been deliberate. Yet Denney affirmed these four truths: first, that 'the relations of God and man . . . are personal, but ... determined by (moral) law' ; second, 'that there is in the nature of things a reaction against sin which when it has had its perfect work is fatal, that this reaction is the divine punishment of sin, and that its finally fatal character is what is meant by Scripture when it says that the wages of sin is death'; third, that 'the inevitable reactions of the divine order against evil... are the sin itself coming back in another form and finding out the sinner. They are nothing if not retributive'; and, fourth, 'that while the agony and the Passion were not penal in the sense of coming upon Jesus through a bad conscience, or making Him the personal object of divine wrath, they were penal in the sense that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race ... and that without doing so He could not have been the Redeemer of that race from sin'.29 It seems to me that these affirmations point straight to a way of formulating the penal substitution model which is both moral and personal enough to evade all Lampe's strictures and also inclusive of all that the concept means to those who embrace it. But the formulation itself will have to be my own.
So I shall now attempt my analysis of penal substitution as a model of the atonement, under five heads: substitution and retribution; substitution and solidarity; substitution and mystery; substitution and salvation; substitution and divine love. Others who espouse this model must judge whether I analyse it accurately or not.
1. Substitution and retribution
Penal substitution, as an idea, presupposes a penalty (poena) due to us from God the Judge for wrong done and failure to meet his claims. The locus classicus on this is Romans 1:18—3:20, but the thought is everywhere in the New Testament. The judicial context is a moral context too; whereas human judicial systems are not always rooted in moral reality, the Bible treats the worlds of moral reality and of divine judgment as coinciding. Divine judgment means that retribution is entailed by our past upon our present and future existence, and God himself is in charge of this process, ensuring that the objective wrongness and guiltiness of what we have been is always 'there' to touch and wither what we are and shall be. In the words of Emil Brunner, 'Guilt means that our past — that which can never be made good — always constitutes one element in our present situation.'30 When Lady Macbeth, walking and talking in her sleep, sees blood on her hand, and cannot clean or sweeten it, she witnesses to the order of retribution as all writers of tragedy and surely all reflective men — certainly, those who believe in penal substitution — have come to know it: wrongdoing may be forgotten for a time, as David forgot his sin over Bathsheba and Uriah, but sooner or later it comes back to mind, as David's sin did under Nathan's ministry, and at once our attention is absorbed, our peace and pleasure are gone, and something tells us that we ought to suffer for what we have done. When joined with inklings of God's displeasure, this sense of things is the start of hell. Now it is into this context of awareness that the model of penal substitution is
introduced, to focus for us four insights about our situation.
Insight one concerns God; it is that the retributive principle has his sanction, and indeed expresses the holiness, justice and goodness reflected in his law, and that death, spiritual as well as physical, the loss of the life of God as well as that of the body, is the rightful sentence which he has announced against us, and now prepares to inflict.
Insight two concerns ourselves: it is that, standing thus under sentence, we are helpless either to undo, the past or to shake off sin in the present, and thus have no way of averting what threatens.
Insight three concerns Jesus Christ: it is that he, the God-man of John 1:1-18 and Hebrews 1-2, took our place under judgment and received in his own personal experience all the dimensions of' the death that was our sentence, whatever these were, so laying the foundation for our pardon and immunity.
'We may not know, we cannot tell
What pains he had to bear;
But we believe it was for us
He hung and suffered there.'
Insight four concerns faith: it is that faith is a matter first and foremost of looking outside and away from oneself to Christ and his cross as the sole ground of present forgiveness and future hope. Faith sees that God's demands remain what they were, and that God's law of retribution, which our conscience declares to be right, has not ceased to operate in his world, nor ever will; but that in our case the law has operated already, so that all our sins, past present and even future, have been covered by Calvary. So our conscience is pacified by the knowledge that our sins have already been judged and punished, however strange the statement may sound, in the person and death of another. Bunyan's pilgrim before the cross loses his burden, and Toplady can assure himself that:
'If thou my pardon hast secured,
And freely in my room endured
The whole of wrath divine,
Payment God cannot twice demand,
First from my bleeding surety's hand
And then again from mine.'
Reasoning thus, faith grasps the reality of God's free gift of righteousness, i.e. the 'rightness' with God that the righteous enjoy (cf. Rom. 5:16f.), and with it the justified man's obligation to live henceforth 'unto' the one who for his sake died and rose again (cf. 2 Cor. 5:14).
This analysis, if correct, shows what job the word 'penal' does in our model. It is there, not to prompt theoretical puzzlement about the transferring of guilt, but to articulate the insight of believers who, as they look at Calvary in the light of the New Testament, are constrained to say, 'Jesus was bearing the judgment I deserved (and deserve), the penalty for my sins, the punishment due to me' — 'he loved me, and gave himself for me' (Gal. 2:20). How it was possible for him to bear their penalty they do not claim to know, any more than they know how it was possible for him to be made man; but that he bore it is the certainty on which all their hopes rest.
2. Substitution and solidarity
Anticipating the rationalistic criticism that guilt is not transferable and the substitution described, if real, would be immoral, our model now invokes Paul's description of the Lord Jesus Christ as the second man and last Adam, who involved us in his sin-bearing as truly as Adam involved us in his sinning (cf. 1 Cor. 15:45ff.; Rom. 5:12 ff.). Penal substitution was seen by Luther, the pioneer in stating it, and by those who came after as grounded in this ontological solidarity, and as being one 'moment' in the larger mystery of what Luther called 'a wonderful exchange'31 and Dr Morna Hooker designates 'interchange in Christ',32 In this mystery there are four 'moments' to be distinguished The first is the incarnation when the Son of God came into the human situation, 'born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem them which were under the law' (Gal. 4:4f.). The second 'moment' was the cross, where Jesus, as Luther and Calvin put it, carried our identity33 and effectively involved us all in his dying — as Paul says, 'one died for all, therefore all died' (2 Cor. 5:14). Nor is this sharing in Christ's death a legal fiction, a form of words to which no reality corresponds; it is part of the objective fact of Christ, the mystery that is 'there' whether we grasp it or not. So now Christ's substitution for us, which is exclusive in the sense of making the work of atonement wholly his and allowing us no share in performing it, is seen to be from another standpoint inclusive of us, inasmuch as ontologically and objectively, in a manner transcending bounds of space and time, Christ has taken us with him into his death and through his death into his resurrection. Thus knowledge of Christ's death for us as our sin-bearing substitute requires us to see ourselves ac dead, risen and alive for evermore in him, We who believe have died — painlessly and invisibly, we might say — in solidarity with him because he died, painfully and publicly, in substitution for us. His death for us brought remission of sins committed 'in' Adam so that 'in' him we might enjoy God's acceptance; our death 'in' him brings release from the existence we knew 'in' Adam, so that 'in' him we are raised to new life and become new creatures (cf. Rom. 5–6; 2 Cor. 5:17, 21; Col. 2:6-3:4). The third 'moment' in this interchange comes when, through faith and God's gift of the Spirit, we become 'the righteousness of God' and 'rich' — that is, justified from sin and accepted as heirs of God in and with Christ — by virtue of him who became 'poor' for us in the incarnation and was 'made sin' for us by penal substitution on the cross (cf. 2 Cor. 5:21, 8:9). And the fourth 'moment' will be when this same Jesus Christ, who was exalted to glory after being humbled to death for us, reappears to 'fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory' (cf. Phil. 2:5-11, 3:21).
Sometimes it is urged that in relation to this comprehensive mystery of solidarity and interchange, viewed as a whole, Christ the 'pioneer' (archagos: Heb. 2:10, 12:2) is best designated the 'representative' and 'first-fruits' of the new humanity, rather than be called our substitute.34 Inasmuch as the interchange-theme centres upon our renewal in Christ's image, this point may be readily accepted, provided it Is also seen that in relation to the particular mystery of sin-bearing, which is at the heart of the interchange, Christ as victim of the penal process has to be called our substitute, since the purpose and effect of his suffering was precisely to ensure that no such suffering — no Godforsakenness, no dereliction — should remain for us. In the light of earlier discussion35 we are already entitled to dismiss the proposal to call Christ's death representative rather than substitutionary as both confusing and confused, since it suggests, first, that we chose Christ to act for us, second, that the death we die in him is of the same order as the death he died for us, and third, that by dying in Christ we atone for our sins — all of which are false. Here now is a further reason for rejecting the proposal — namely, that it misses or muffs the point that what Christ bore on the cross was the Godforsakenness of penal judgment, which we shall never have to bear because he accepted it in our place. The appropriate formulation is that on the cross Jesus' representative relation to us, as the last Adam whose image we are to bear, took the form of substituting for us under judgment, as the suffering servant of God on whom the Lord 'laid the iniquity of us all'.36 The two ideas, representation and substitution, are complementary, not alternatives, and both are needed here.
3 Substitution and mystery
It will by now be clear that those who affirm penal substitution offer this model not as an explanatory analysis of what lay 'behind' Christ's atoning, death in the way that the laws of heat provide an explanatory analysis of what lies 'behind' the boiling of a kettle, but rather as a pointer directing attention to various fundamental features of' the mystery — that is, according to our earlier definition, the transcendent and not-wholly-comprehensible divine reality — of Christ's atoning death itself, as the New Testament writers declare it, Most prominent among these features are the mysterious divine love which was its source, and of which it is the measure (cf. Rom. 5:8; 1John 4:8-10; John 15:13); the mysterious necessity for it, evident from Paul's witness in Romans 8:32 that God did not spare his Son, but gave him up to death for us, which shows that, he being he, he could not have saved us at any less cost to himself; the mysterious solidarity in virtue of which Christ could be 'made sin' by the imputing to him of our answerability, and could die for our sins in our place, and we could be 'made righteous' before God through faith by the virtue of his obedience (cf. Rom. 5:17-19; 2Cor. 5:21); and the mysterious mode of union whereby, without any diminution of our individuality as persons, or his, Christ and we are 'in' each other in such a sense that already we have passed with him through death into risen life. Recognition of these mysteries causes no embarrassment, nor need it; since the cross is undeniably central in the New Testament witness to God's work, it was only to be expected that more dimensions of mystery would be found clustered here than anywhere. (Indeed, there are more than we listed; for a full statement, the tri-unity of the loving God, the incarnation itself, and God's predestining the free acts of his enemies, would also, have to come in.) To the question, what does the cross mean in God's plan for man's good, a biblical answer is ready to hand, but when we ask how these things can be we find ourselves facing mystery at every point.
Rationalistic criticism since Socinus has persistently called in question both the so1idarity on which substitution is based and the need for penal satisfaction as a basis for forgiveness. This, however, is 'naturalistic' criticism, which assumes that what man could not do or would not require God will not do or require either. Such criticism is profoundly perverse, for it shrinks God the Creator into the image of man the creature and loses sight of the paradoxical quality of the gospel of which the New Testament is so clearly aware. (When man justifies the wicked, it is a miscarriage of justice which God hates, but when God justifies the ungodly it is a miracle of grace for us to adore [Prov, 17:15; Rom. 4:5].) The way to stand against naturalistic theology is to keep in view its reductionist method which makes man the standard for God; to stress that according to Scripture the Creator and his work are of necessity mysterious to us, even as revealed (to make this point is the proper logical task of the word 'supernatural' in theology); and to remember that what is above reason is not necessari1y against it. As regards the atonement, the appropriate response to the Socinian critique starts by laying down that all our understanding of the cross comes from attending to the biblical witnesses and learning to hear and echo what they say about it; speculative rationalism breeds only misunderstanding, nothing more.
4. Substitution and salvation
So far our analysis has, I think, expressed the beliefs of all who would say that penal substitution is the key to understanding the cross. But now comes a point of uncertainty and division. That Christ's penal substitution for us under divine judgment is the sole meritorious ground on which our relationship with God is restored, and is in this sense decisive for our salvation, is a Reformation point against Rome37 to which all conservative Protestants hold. But in ordinary everyday contexts substitution is a definite and precise relationship whereby the specific obligations of one or more persons are taken over and discharged by someone else (as on the memorable occasion when I had to cry off a meeting at two days' notice due to an air strike and found afterwards that Billy Graham had consented to speak as my substitute). Should we not then think of Christ's substitution for us on the cross as a definite, one-to-one relationship between him and each individual sinner? This seems scriptural, for Paul says, 'He loved me and gave himself for me'
(Gal. 2:20). But if Christ specifically took and discharged my penal obligation as a sinner, does it not follow that the cross was decisive for my salvation not only as its sole meritorious ground, but also as guaranteeing that I should be brought to faith, and through faith to eternal life? For is not the faith which receives salvation part of God's gift of salvation, according to what is affirmed in Philippians 1:29 and John 6:44f. and implied in what Paul says of God calling and John of new birth?38 And if Christ by his death on my behalf secured, reconciliation and righteousness as gifts for me to receive (Rom. 5:11, 17), did not this make it certain that the faith which receives these gifts would also be given me, as a direct consequence of Christ's dying for me? Once this is granted, however, we are shut up to a choice between universa1ism and some form of the view that Christ died to save only a part of the human race. But if we reject these options, what have we left? The only coherent alternative is to suppose that though God purposed to save every man through the cross, some thwart his purpose by persistent unbelief; which can only be said if one is ready to maintain that God, after all, does no more than make faith possible, and then in some sense that is decisive for him as well as us leaves it to us to make faith actual. Moreover, any who take this position must redefine substitution in imprecise terms, if indeed they do not drop the term altogether, for they are committing themselves to deny that Christ's vicarious sacrifice ensures anyone's salvation. Also, they have to give up Toplady's position. 'Payment God cannot twice demand, First from my bleeding surety's hand, And then again from mine' — for it is of the essence of their view that some whose sins Christ bore, with saving intent, will ultimately pay the penalty for those same sins in their own persons. So it seems that if we are going to affirm penal substitution for all without exception we must either infer universal salvation or else, to evade this inference, deny the saving efficacy of the substitution for anyone; and if we are going to affirm penal substitution as an effective saving act of God we must either infer universal salvation or else, to evade this inference, restrict the scope of the substitution, making it a substitution for some, not all.39
All this is familiar ground to students of the Arminian controversy of the first half of the seventeenth century and of the conservative Reformed tradition since that time;40 only the presentation is novel, since I have ventured to point up the problem as one of defining Christ's substitution, taking this as the key word for the view we are exploring. In modern usage that indeed is what it is, but only during the past century has it become so; prior to that, all conservative Protestants, at least in the English-speaking world, preferred 'satisfaction' as the label and key word for their doctrine of the cross.41
As I pointed it up, the matter in debate might seem purely verbal, but there is more to it than that. The question is, whether the thought that substitution entails salvation does or does not belong to the convictional 'weave' of Scripture, to which 'penal substitution' as a theological model must conform. There seems little doubt as to the answer. Though the New Testament writers do not discuss the question in anything like this form, nor is their language about .the cross always as guarded as language has to be once debate on the problem has begun, they do in fact constantly take for granted that the death of Christ is the act of God which has made certain the salvation of those who are saved. The use made of the categories of ransom, redemption, reconciliation, sacrifice and victory; the many declarations of God's purpose that Christ through the cross should save those given him, the church, his sheep and friends, God's people; the many statements viewing Christ's heavenly intercession and work in men as the outflow of what he did for them by his death; and the uniform view of faith as a means, not of meriting, but of receiving — all these features point unambiguously in one direction. Twice in Romans Paul makes explicit his conviction that Christ's having died 'for' (huper) us — that is, us who now believe — guarantees final blessedness. In 5:8f. he says: 'While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood, shall we be saved from the wrath through him.' In 8:32 he asks: 'He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things?' Moreover, Paul and John explicitly depict God's saving work as a unity in which Christ's death fulfils a purpose of election and leads on to what the Puritans called 'application of redemption' — God 'calling' and 'drawing' unbelievers to himself, justifying them from their sins and giving them life as they believe, and finally glorifying them with Christ in his own presence.42 To be sure, Paul and John insist, as all the New Testament does, that God in the gospel promises life and salvation to everyone who believes and calls on Christ (cf. John 3:16; Rom. 10:13); this, indeed, is to them the primary truth, and when the plan of salvation appears in their writings (in John's case, on the lips of our Lord) its logical role is to account for, and give hope of, the phenomenon of sinners responding to God's promise. Thus, through the knowledge that God is resolved to evoke the response he commands, Christians are assured of being kept safe, and evangelists of not labouring in vain. It may be added: is there any good reason for finding difficulty with the notion that the cross both justifies the 'free offer' of Christ to all men and also guarantees the believing, the accepting and the glorifying of those who respond, when this was precisely what Paul and John affirmed?
At all events, if the use historically made of the penal substitution model is examined, there is no doubt, despite occasional contusions of thought, that part of the intention is to celebrate the decisiveness of the cross as in every sense the procuring cause of salvation.
5. Substitution and divine love
The penal substitution model has been criticised for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love man, which he did not do before. The criticism is, however, inept, for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model, for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic. The New Testament presents God's gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men. 'God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son' (John 3:16). 'God is love, ... Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins' (1 John 4:8-10). 'God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us' (Rom. 5:8), Similarly, the New Testament presents the Son's voluntary acceptance of death as the supreme expression of his love to men. 'He loved me, and gave himself for me' (Gal. 2:20). 'Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends . . .' (John 15:13f.) And the two loves, the love of Father and Son, are one: a point which the penal substitution model, as used, firmly grasps.
Furthermore, if the true measure of love is how low it stoops to help, and how much in its humility it is ready to do and bear, then it may fairly be claimed that the penal substitutionary model embodies a richer witness to divine love than any other model of atonement, for it sees the Son at his Father's will going lower than any other view ventures to suggest. That death on the cross was a criminal's death, physically as painful as, if not more painful than, any mode of judicial execution that the world has seen; and that Jesus endured it in full consciousness of being innocent before God and man, and yet of being despised and rejected, whether in malicious conceit or in sheer fecklessness, by persons he had loved and tried to save — this is ground common to all views, and tells us already that the love of Jesus, which took him to the cross, brought him appallingly low. But the penal substitution model adds to all this a further dimension of truly unimaginable distress, compared with which everything mentioned so far pales into insignificance. This is the dimension indicated by Denney — 'that in that dark hour He had to realise to the full the divine reaction against sin in the race.' Owen stated this formally, abstractly and non-psychologically: Christ, he said, satisfied God's justice 'for all the sins of all those for whom he made satisfaction, by undergoing that same punishment which, by reason of the obligation that was upon them, they were bound to undergo. When I say the same I mean essentially the same in weight and pressure, though not in all accidents of duration and the like ...'43 Jonathan Edwards expressed the thought with tender and noble empathy: 'God dealt with him as if he had been exceedingly angry with him, and as though he had been the object of his dreadful wrath. This made all the sufferings of Christ the more terrible to him, because they were from the hand of his Father, whom he infinitely loved, and whose infinite love he had had eternal experience of. Besides, it was an effect of God's wrath that he forsook Christ. This caused Christ to cry out ... "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" This was infinitely terrible to Christ. Christ's knowledge of the glory of the Father, and his love to the Father, and the sense and experience he had had of the worth of his Father's love to him, made the withholding the pleasant ideas and manifestations of his Father's love as terrible to him, as the sense and knowledge of his hatred is to the damned, that have no knowledge of God's excellency, no love to him, nor any experience of the infinite sweetness of his love.'44 And the legendary 'Rabbi' Duncan concentrated it all into a single unforgettable sentence, in a famous outburst to one of his classes: 'D'ye know what Calvary was? what? what? what?' Then, with tears on his face — 'It was damnation; and he took it lovingly.' It is precisely this love that, in the last analysis, penal substitution is all about, and that explains its power in the lives of those who acknowledge it.45
What was potentially the most damaging criticism of penal substitution came not from Socinus, but from McLeod Campbell, who argued that by saying that God must punish sin but need not act in mercy at all (and in fact does not act in mercy towards all), Reformed exponents of this view reduced God's love to an arbitrary decision which does not reveal his character, but leaves him even in blessing us an enigma to us, 'the unknown God'.46 The real target of Campbell's criticism is the Scotist model of divine personality with which, rightly or wrongly, he thought Reformed theologians worked; and a sufficient reply, from the standpoint of this lecture, would be that since the Bible says both that Christ's death was a penal substitution for God's people and also that it reveals God's love to sinful men as such, and since the Bible further declares that Christ is the Father's image, so that everything we learn of the Son's love is knowledge of the Father's love also, Campbell's complaint is unreal. But Campbell's criticism, if carried, would be fatal, for any account of the atonement that fails to highlight its character as a revelation of redeeming love stands self-condemned.
The ingredients in the evangelical model of penal substitution are now, I believe, all before us, along with the task it performs. It embodies and expresses insights about the cross which are basic to personal religion, and which I therefore state in personal terms, as follows:
(1) God, in Denney's phrase, 'condones nothing', but judges all sin as it deserves: which Scripture affirms, and my conscience confirms, to be right.
(2) My sins merit ultimate penal suffering and rejection from God's presence (conscience also confirms this), and nothing I do can blot them out.
(3) The penalty due to me for my sins, whatever it was, was paid for me by Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in his death on the cross.
(4) Because this is so, I through faith in him am made 'the righteousness of God in him', i.e. I am justified; pardon, acceptance and sonship become mine.
(5) Christ's death for me is my sole ground of hope before God. 'If he fulfilled not justice, I must; if he underwent not wrath, I must to eternity.'47
(6) My faith in Christ is God's own gift to me, given in virtue of Christ's death for me: i.e. the cross procured it.
(7) Christ's death for me guarantees my preservation to glory.
(8) Christ's death for me is the measure and pledge of the love of the Father and the Son to me.
(9) Christ's death for me calls and constrains me to trust, to worship, to love and to serve.
Thus we see what, according to this model, the cross achieved and achieves.