Penal Substitution AND Christus Victor?

Dave sent me an email with some challenging questions regarding my article “ Penal Substitution vs. Christus Victor” that I thought it might be interesting to answer in a blog. So here we go. I'll put Dave's questions in bold.

I read your article "Penal Substitution V Christus Victor" with interest. It is a very stimulating document. However -can I challenge you to engage more with what those advocating Penal Substitution are and are not arguing. There are a few things worth considering.

First the literature around -worth considering the old classic The Cross of Christ -John Stott and of course more recently Sach Ovey and Jeffry, Pierced for our transgression. Also Tom Wright's support for Penal Subsitution. Certainly the line would be not CV v PSA but rather PSA and CV togethr helping to give a full picture.

I have read Stott's book many times. It is certainly a classic as far as PS goes. I have also read “Pierced for Our Transgressions” and thought that was in contrast very poorly researched. I think they completely misrepresent for example the positions of people like Augustine and Athanasius. NT Wright has had some pretty negative things to say about this book. For what its worth, I have also spoken with NT Wright personally about PS, and he actually rejects it while embracing substitutionary atonement understood within the context of CV.

Let me mention a few other books on the side of PS that I found quite good. “The Glory of Penal Substitution” has quite a few good papers in it worth reading. I particularly liked the one by Van Hoozer. Packer's article “The Logic of Penal Substitution” is brilliant (and available online). Leon Morris “Apostolic Preaching” has some phenomenal research in it. Then there are people like PT Forsyth and James Denney who have some great stuff too.

One thing here that crystallizes with reading Forsyth, Denney, Van Hoozer, and Packer is that a great deal of the criticisms that are made of PS have also been made by people advocating PS too. So it is possible to embrace PS and at the same time be critical of its more legalistic and “crude” expressions. The question then becomes: what would a sophisticated and grace centered version of PS look like as opposed to a legalistic one?

This is perhaps best captured by Packer's now famous quote
“…Jesus Christ our Lord moved by a love that was determined to do everything necessary to save us, endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgement for which we were otherwise inescapably destined and so won us forgiveness adoption and glory.”

Great quote. Do you recall where Packer said this?

It may surprise you to hear that, as it stands, I would agree with the above quote. I would want to refine and clarify a few points I am sure, but I will say that I do think that substitutionary atonement (which is a broader term than PS) is the linchpin of the entire atonement – the means of our redemption.

Where I would want to tweak the above statement is the phrase “endured and exhausted the destructive divine judgement”. I do not think that the God needed to “get his anger out of his system” by punishing someone, even if that someone was himself. I would say instead that wrath is averted through our purification, or in technical terms that propitiation happens through expiation. Remove the sin (expiation) and you remove the cause of judgement (propitiation). Expiation is the key concept here in the atonement – our transformation and purification through Christ's blood.

So with that in mind can we say that Christ endured the judgement and death that humanity was due? Absolutely. The question is why? For what reason? That's where I think PS gets it wrong. The reason is expiation.

Key things there

1. Moved by a love... -this is language of love. It is an uncharitable nonsense to suggest that "In Satisfaction-Doctrine love is not central, but viewed with suspicion." I appreciate my language is strong there -but we have got to be right when we talk about what people believe.

Yes, love does need to be seen as the motivating factor. Some (for example Emil Brunner) have instead stressed that the need to fulfill the demands of justice or moral law was the key factor. I disagree, and so do people like Packer and Denney.

I's say that most Evangelicals who embrace PS do so because they see the love and grace of God in that he would endure suffering out of love for us. This is something I certainly would embrace as well. The problem is that many other people hearing the stress on God demanding punishment have gotten the opposite impression which has lead them to a hurtful image of God that damages their trust and can keep them from grace. Beyond any theological issues, I think this is the key issue: how can we present the Gospel and atonement so that people hear the message of a loving and just God they can trust? At least on a popular level (and often on an academic level as well) this has been quite problematic with PS because people are often more concerned with defending doctrine than they are with communicating grace (and here I will resist naming names, but I can unfortunately think of quite a few). I do want to stress also that I do not mean to imply that you are doing this at all. On the contrary, I greatly appreciated the generous and irenic tone in your post.

If it is as Aulen would say about reconciliation between God and man -then it is our relationship to him. Is sin simply the thing that oppresses us? What about the sense in which we identify with those who killed Jesus -those who are hostile to God.

I think you may be misunderstanding Aulen here (which may be my fault). He would say that the cross is primarily about our redemption (deliverance) by God from the bondage of sin, death, and the devil not of reconciliation (forgivness) between God and humanity. In that context he speaks of a “doublesidedness” where we are at the same time the victim of sin – its captive – and are guilty and culpable because it is our sin that has led us into this bondage. So we have humans as being both victims and perpetrators, needing to be liberated/ransomed/redeemed and reconciled/forgiven.

Christus Victor in opposition to Penal Substitution places us in a difficult position because -we are the ones who should be defeated by his victory.

I agree and disagree here.

I disagree in that I'd say our “defeat” is a necessary part of the atonement in that our sin and we are overcome and in that our identity is transformed from being a “son of perdition” to a son or daughter of God. Our enmity is defeated.

I would agree that a full view would need to see the themes of substitution and ransom rather together rather than as opposed, but would say that because PS and CV are essentially incompatible this merger, this would need to be in the form of CV together with an incarnational understanding of substitutionary atonement.

We need of course to bring other elements to bear -especially the idea of faith union.

Yes! I would argue here that the way to understand substitutionary atonement is not in terms of satisfaction of punishment or propitiation of wrath, but as recapitulation – God enters into our wretchedness, lostness, suffering, sickness, and sin and as us representationally overcomes death and hell in rising from the dead. In dying and rising as us (representationally, incarnation ally) Christ makes it possible for us to die and rise in Christ as well so that we are made holy through our union with him, us in Christ and Christ in us transforming us through an indwelling personal relationship with God.

Thanks for the challenging questions, and I hope you find some edification here in my response as well.

Evil in us

Adam recently asked this in the comment section of a blog on God's justice. I thought it was such a good question that I wanted to devote a blog post to it. Here's Adam's question:

I just finished reading your essay on penal substitution vs christus victor. I am very intrigued and I think you are putting into words some things that have been on my mind for a while. One thing I struggle with there and in this blog post is the idea that christus victor takes on a victim mentality to sin. I would really like to know how this view of atonement fits in with the idea that we do viciously choose to sin and are guilty, not just victims, of evil.

If God is out to fight evil then in a sense he is out to fight us since the fall corrupted us such that we have become evil ourselves. This is the one issue I am grappling with. I can understand how the cross works to free us from the oppression of evil, but not how it deals with the fact that I am evil.

I do think there is a tendency for people today (myself included) to see ourselves in terms of victims. This comes as a response to many people being wounded by self-destructive guilt and self-loathing. As a result we shake off this negative self-hatred, and instead see ourselves as broken. Christus Victor speaks to this self understanding. But at the same time there is a danger in us only using Christus Victor to echo the sentiment of our own time, rather than letting it speak to evil on a much broader scale, including the evil in us. If we have all been hurt, it stands to reason that we have also deeply hurt others. We need to own up to that, not out of self-loathing, but out of compassion for the hurt we have done to others which produces other-focused regret and remorse.

Christus Victor, as expressed by the early church stressed that we shared culpability in our captivity. This is expressed in the often misunderstood legal idea of humanity being enslaved to the devil. The point here Gustav Aulen argues was not (as Anselm had it) to say that the devil has any rights, but to stress humanity's own participation and guilt that led to its bondage. This echoes the Hebrew prophet's understanding that Israel was in Exile under the oppressive pagan rule because of her sin. In the New Testament this external political bondage is taken to a deeper level where we see that our enemy is not some other nation, but evil and oppression itself, and that this evil is not in them over there, but in us. Which brings us to Adam's question: if God is opposed to evil, and we are ourselves evil, how can we be saved?

We cannot simply be removed from external bondage, nor is it enough to merely wipe the legal charges clean. What we need is a change of identity. We need to not only change what we do, but who (and whose) we are. So Scripture speaks of us going from being children of wrath, defined by the hurt and hate of the world, to being adopted children of God. In terms of the Atonement, this is known as "recapitulation". God becomes human, entering into our estate in all of its weakness, woundedness, shame, and guilt. God in Christ so deeply identifies with us in our wretchedness that he "becomes sin" and suffers godforsakenness and accursedness for our sake. Because having been embraced in our darkness and ugliness, we can share in the resurrection life of God.

That plays out in our own lives as we experience the new birth, where God's spirit comes to live in our hearts, and we can cry out with this inner witness "Abba! Father!" as the Spirit of God in us testifies to our inmost being that we are a new creation, born from above. We die to our old self, defined by the world, an enemy of God, and are raised to life in Christ. As we abide in Christ, in an intimate personal relationship with God, we come to know God's grace and love first hand, and that love transforms us into Christ's image. So the cross works to free us of our evil when we come to Jesus and join him in his cross and resurrection. There at the foot of his cross we die to our evil hurtful self, and are born again. We are brought out of our self-focus and separation, and united with Christ, restored into relationship with God, where we were always meant to abide and thrive. In that sense we are justified, meaning "set aright", by being restored into relationship with God as his beloved.

Yes we were because of our own evil God's enemies, but God loves his enemies and gave his life for us while we were his enemies so that we could be conquered and overcome and brought back to our eternal home.

These Infinite Spaces

My article " Understanding the Cross: Penal Substitution vs Christus Victor is generating some lively dialog over on the Blog These Infinate Spaces. I've included some of my responses here for you. You can check out the whole thing in context here. Just so you know, the text below "CV" stands for Christus Victor and "PS" for Penal Subsitution.

Craig writes: "What Anselm rejected in the Ransom theory was the idea that God had to make a bargain with the devil, and that He essentially tricked the devil into releasing human souls"

This criticism was not a new idea with Anselm. The Church Fathers had argued extensively about the best way to formulate this, and had made similar criticisms themselves. What is of monumental significance is that with Anselm, a major shift occurred where salvation was no longer understood in the deep terms of humanity being enslaved to sin and our need to be liberated from that bondage, but instead viewed sin in the legal terms of transgression, understanding salvation as paying a penalty to “satisfy” the demands of law. When the central understanding of atonement shifted from ransom from slavery to satisfaction of justice, the paradigm for sin shifted with it from the relational idea of bondage (who we belong to) to the legal idea of transgression (what we do).

With that, the deep reaching impact of the Christus Victor soterology was last and "Christus Victor" became in the minds of many Evangelicals today an insignificant appendix (for example with both John Stott and Derek Tidball). It is this "tacking on" of Christus Victor that I find problematic. I think it actually has some really profound implications that need to be explored. Two people who have pioneered this in different areas are Jürgen Moltmann and Walter Wink.

David writes:
"As Craig rightly asserts, CV doesn't really have a vigorous understanding of a personified Satan"

This statement surprised me. I would disagree and say that CV is in fact rooted in a deep understanding of the devil, and that PS is lacking in it. One can completely leave the devil out of the formulation of Penal Substitution. Christus Victor on the other hand is rooted in the idea of Christ overcoming "sin, death, and the devil". It expands the idea of sin beyond "transgression" to "bondage" showing the deep reaching consequences of evil in the human heart. CV is essentially about a change of identity from bondage to adoption, the theme of "redemption from slavery". The devil is crucial to this understanding.

What Gustav Aulen has removed from the ransom theory is not the devil, but its heavy legal focus and replaced it with a dramatic focus. Quite a number of major Evangelical theologians including JI Packer and James Denney have sharply criticized the legal focus in PS as well, and Packer has suggested that PS should also be seen (following Aulen) with a dramatic rather than legal focus (which he Packer sharply criticizes).

So what is so bad about a legal focus? I am not really arguing that it is "cold". I think one can me emotional and cold as well. In fact as an aside, I find Jonathan Edwards a pretty bad example of positive emotion since he was pretty nasty. I would instead suggest Spurgeon who was a PS advocating Calvinist with a huge heart for the lost. He is an excellent example of "positive emotion". The problem I have with a legal theory of the cross is twofold (there are other reasons, but I will limit myself for brevity sake):

1) A legal focus does not express the focus of Scripture which is clearly on the supremacy of love (Love is the "greatest commandment", the "sum of the law and the profits", if I "have not love I am nothing", "God is love", etc) over the law which the NT (both Jesus and Paul) are quite critical of. Biblically focus of the Atonement needs to be relational not legal. It was an expression of God's amazing love for us.

2) A legal focus trivializes sin. Sin is not simply an infraction, it is a cancer. It is bondage. It is about identity (who we belong to and who we are). It is a deep rooted problem that needs to be deeply addressed. Punishment does not heal the wounds of the sinner nor those who have been sinned against. It is superficial. What people need is a profound inner transformation, a change in identity, healing for their cancer. These are all aspects of God's work that a legal theory simply cannot capture.

So why don't we then have, as Packer suggests, a dramatic relational understanding of PS? Good idea. This is I think how most Evangelicals understand the cross: they see the great cost, they are humbled that this was "for them", they are moved by dramatic depictions like the movie "The Passion". The problem here is that while we can and should have a dramatic understanding of substitutionary atonement and vicarious sacrifice (as Luther did) there is a fundamental flaw specifically in PS's explanation of that vicarious sacrifice:

The idea of "satisfaction" does not mean "to gratify" as it does in English today but "to make restitution". With Anselm the idea of satisfaction/restitution was a way to avoid punishment. We make restitution and thus avoid punishment (pay the fine avoid a whipping). Specifically with the cross, Jesus make restitution by restoring God's honor (by giving his life so nobly for us Jesus gave God extra honor beyond what was due God in the sinless life of Jesus making up for the honor God had lost because of our dishonoring sin). Since restitution/satisfaction had been made there was no reason for the punishment. Now of course this whole system of honor is an artificial man-made concept of feudal times, but within Anselm's framework it does all make sense. I think there is in fact (if we could pull it out of its feudal legal framework a bit) some deep things about Anselm's theory. PT Forsyth does a good job of exploring this.

With Thomas Aquinas the idea of satisfaction/restitution changed. Unlike Anselm who said one made restitution to avoid punishment (pay the fine or go to jail) Aquinas said that it was the punishment that made the restitution (By seeing someone hurt you felt better). On a carnal level we can see how making someone hurt who hurt us would be "satisfying" (that is, gratifying). Its the basic desire for revenge, for payback. Whether it "makes things right" (restitution) is debatable. But there's another level here: What if instead of whipping and executing the guilty man we instead take someone who is innocent and good and beat and execute them instead and then let the guilty one go free? Does that sound like a fulfillment of justice? No, it sounds terrible. This is the elephant in the room of PS, it is as a (legal) theory profoundly unjust.

Compare that with the idea of someone giving their life for another, a firefighter who dies rescuing others from the flames, a body guard who takes a bullet for someone. this is heroic and deeply moving. We often see in movies the hero say to the terrorists who are going to kill someone (usually female) "No take me!". I think anyone with kids who are sick and suffering can relate to the wish that we could suffer instead of them. "I'd give anything to take their place" we say. But what is the theme here? It is Christus Victor. The bullet, the burning building, the ravaging disease, the terrorists, are not pictures of "justice being satisfied" they are bad things. Pictures of the Accuser, of Satan.

In short the vicarious sacrifice "in our place" is a moving and dramatic idea that is all over the NT. But explaining it in legal terms gives completely the wrong impression because in a legal sense it would be profoundly unjust. Understood in a relational sense however, as a ransom, as a redemption, it makes perfect sense.

Craig writes:
"Derek, I don't understand how you can reject the category of law, but still wish to uphold the concept of justice. Law is justice implemented and applied."

I would differentiate between human laws which are an outwardly imposed artificial human construct, and God's moral law which is simply the way the universe works. Sin is not punished by some extra action of God, sin "leads to death" just like hitting the ground is the consequence of gravity. God "gives us over to wrath" Paul says. God's moral laws are written into the fabric of who we are. Their consequences are inevitable flowing from the nature of how life works, again like gravity. Biblically this is not "justice", it is wrath, the curse, death. "Justice" biblically speaking is about "making things right". This was Luther's major discovery. Justice was not about consequence for sin as the Scholastics taught, it was about God making thing right.

Michael writes,
"The problem I can see with Derek's Christus Victor scheme is dualism... which is to say: God is not in any sense here the agent of our judgment/punishment."

I don't see this to be the case. I wonder if you have read the entire article on my website rather than merely the posts here? Biblically we have all three expressions:
1)God being the one who brings judgment,
2) judgment coming as a process ("the wrath" and "the curse" in Paul) and
3) judgment being executed by the devil.

So there is a pretty complex picture in Scripture. In Christus Victor the image is of the devil as the "accuser" (which is what "Satan" means) but it is also understood that he has "rights" because we have indeed sinned. This picture is not of God and Satan as co-equal (dualism) but of Satan as a fallen angel.

That means that the law for example is made to be good, made to point to God (not to be equal with God) but can through sin become something that instead leads to death (fallen). So God who desires life seeks a way to redeem both fallen humanity as well as to redeem the fallen law through grace. It is a more complex view than PS to incorporate the idea of fallenness and the devil, but I think it is also truer to both the complexity of the Biblical witness and to life. I go into all this in more detail in part 4 of my essay.

You are correct that ultimately God is the author of wrath (and of gravity). Gustav Aulen calls this the "double-sidedness" of the Atonement: God saves us from his own wrath. The Divine Love overcomes the Divine Wrath.