This is an article about penal substitutionary atonement, or PSA. I’d like to attempt the herculean feat of discussing PSA without slander, rancor, or resort to a straw man. I leave it to you, dear reader, to judge whether I succeed.
Speaking of impossible tasks, I’m also going to avoid adjudicating the merits and demerits of PSA itself. I’ll discuss arguments for and against it, but I’m not going to tell you where you should land. Rather, I’m mostly going to talk about how we talk about PSA. Scholars call this “second-order discourse.” Normies call it “meta.” Either way, my concern is not the doctrine per se, but rather the way Christians discuss it with one another—or perhaps I should say, the ways we fail to do so.
With me so far? Good. Let’s get started.
Last month, there was a dustup online about a recent book that purports to be the final nail in the coffin of PSA. I have nothing to say about that book, because I haven’t read it. For my purposes, its publication was only the latest in a long line of confrontations between two groups.
One consists of those who believe that PSA is, at a minimum, a crucial component of the Christian gospel. For some of them, in fact, PSA is the heart of the gospel itself.
Let’s call folks in this first group pro-PSA. Typically, though not always, they are Reformed Protestants and evangelicals, a recognizable mix of academic, pastoral, and lay writers, speakers, and ordinary believers who care deeply about the integrity of Christian faith, doctrine, and preaching.
The second group I’ll call anti-PSA. Adherents in this case are united less by what they share than by what they reject. They include non-Reformed evangelicals, exvangelicals, mainline Protestants, biblical scholars, and members of high-liturgical traditions like Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Roman Catholicism.
Like their backgrounds, the reasons for this second group’s opposition to PSA are diverse. Some believe that it is unbiblical; others that it is a historical novelty; others still that it is specific to Calvinism, a departure from patristic and medieval doctrine, or just bad theology. Above all, they share the conviction—sometimes intellectual, just as often emotional, a visceral gut feeling—that PSA is bad for people to believe.
Why might it be bad to believe? There are two main answers, one vertical and one horizontal. On the vertical side, some say PSA proposes a distorted picture of God. The argument is that the doctrine presents God as a vindictive and bloodthirsty monarch who cannot forgive—whose anger cannot be mollified—until retributive violence is enacted. Such a deity, in effect, hates us until his wrath is satisfied (and maybe still hates us then), the blood sacrifice of an innocent victim converting his wrath into love.
When anti-PSA rhetoric is turned up to 11, people designate this “divine child abuse.” In this telling, the Father must vent his anger upon his own Son, raining down unspeakable cosmic punishment until every last drop of blood is paid for sin. Only then do grace and mercy become available to the guilty.
On the horizontal side, some say PSA is bad because it distorts human relationships. Whether in the family, the city, or the church, justice becomes retributive and punitive all the way down. Transgressors get what’s coming to them, justice is indistinguishable from vengeance, and the forces of law and order imitate Almighty God by forswearing mercy and executing punishment to the last farthing. Parental and church discipline become unsparing. Guilt, shame, and public punishment are integrated within and inseparable from every level of society, informing responses to everything from childish errors to grave evils.
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Now, before we ask what the pro-PSA have to say for themselves, it’s worth pausing to make two observations. First, whatever the merits of the anti-PSA case, it is very rarely marked by making a steel man of the opposing position—or even truly engaging it. That is to say, anti-PSA advocates often are not talking to their pro-PSA brothers and sisters in Christ. They are talking about and at them. Too often what they are pointing to, mocking, and shouting at is a straw man.
In short, sophisticated theological supporters of PSA are highly unlikely to agree with an anti-PSA summary of their views (high school encounters with Jonathan Edwards notwithstanding). In any debate, Christians talking past one another like this is a problem.
Second, much is made in anti-PSA arguments of the doctrine’s perceived impact. Often—not always—the reasons proposed for rejecting it are consequentialist, which means they are not so much about whether it is true or rooted in biblical teaching as whether its purported downstream effects are desirable.
This is always the weakest way to argue over Christian doctrine. Why? Because the truths of the gospel can always be abused. As the ancient maxim has it, abusus non tollit usum: Abuse does not invalidate proper use. The fact, for example, that some pastors use the faith to benefit themselves financially does not render the faith false; it just means that anything, no matter how good, can be twisted to evil ends.
We should not doubt that PSA may be and sometimes has been put to bad ends, leading to misshapen views of God or shame-filled faith. Yet this does not and cannot obviate the experience of those for whom PSA has produced just the opposite. Nor can we decide the matter by simply weighing positive and negative experiences against each other. That’s just not how Christian theology works. The matter is the thing itself, and the question is whether it’s true. That question, in turn, is answered by turning to Holy Scripture.
So consider now what the pro-PSA would say in reply to their opponents—not the straw man but the genuine article.
First, the Son who suffers divine wrath is himself God in the flesh. There is no division or separation between Father and Son, for together with the Spirit they are one God: one nature, one essence, one will. It is, according to PSA, the one will of the one triune God for the eternal Son of the heavenly Father to assume human nature in order to suffer the justice due sinners, that they might receive his perfect righteousness as a pure, unmerited gift.
Second, the mission of the incarnate Son is not a last-ditch effort to divert the unloving rage of a God who otherwise eternally wishes to smite us. The Father sends the Son in the power of the Spirit precisely in order to save us—and to save us, in Paul’s words, “while we were yet sinners” and “enemies” of God (Rom. 5:8, 10, RSV throughout). Which is to say, to save us when we did not deserve it. The Son does not transform the Father’s disposition from malice to mercy. Jesus’ very presence among us is a revelation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’s united, sovereign, and invincible mercy toward sinners from everlasting to everlasting.
Third, PSA is a particular combination of elements in the biblical witness that no one can deny. These elements include justice, wrath, transgression, guilt, debt, punishment, and exchange. At their best, advocates of PSA believe the doctrine integrates these biblical elements into a single vision of God’s saving work in Christ that complements, rather than excludes, other orthodox descriptions of the atonement. PSA thus seeks to comprehend God’s multiple roles in relation to us: not only father, brother, and friend but also creator, king, and judge.
The upshot: As lawbreakers, fallen humanity merits punishment in the divine law court. This punishment is God’s own wrath against sin, which is the failure to render God the obedience and worship he is due as Creator. But precisely because he loves us and “desires all people to be saved” (1 Tim. 2:4, ESV), God provides what he demands before we could even think to ask for it. In a word, he provides himself.
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The Lord puts himself in our stead, living the fully human life we failed to live. What is due us he takes upon himself: wrath, curse, punishment, and death. What is due him he gives to us: life, freedom, sonship, and righteousness. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21).
This is the “substitution” in PSA, or what Martin Luther liked to call “this fortunate exchange” whereby Christ “took upon Himself our sinful person and granted us His innocent and victorious Person.” Before Luther a similar understanding was proposed by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury in the late 11th century, who used the language of “satisfaction” to describe what Christ, as the God-man, does in our place, for our sake. He assumed all that we are in order to give us all that he is. In doing so he satisfied the perfect justice of God once for all—a marvelous substitution and unspeakable gift.
Now, having done my best to represent PSA according to its best lights, it seems only fair to do the same for its critics—to continue on in order to model the mode of theological debate I’m aiming to promote. Because while my sketch of anti-PSA objections above is accurate, it remains incomplete. Let me bolster the case with additional criticisms without letting go of the commitment to fraternal charity.
First, consider the difference between the subtleties of academic theology and the practicalities of the pulpit. Far too often the way pastors preach and speak about PSA resembles the straw man I outlined earlier. God sounds vindictive; Father and Son appear opposed; wrath overshadows love; mercy seems secondary rather than primary. PSA may not be wrong, but some pro-PSA pastors are on the hook for sloppy preaching.
Second, anti-PSA Christians are right to object to the way some in the pro-PSA camp treat the doctrine as synonymous with the gospel. This is both unhelpful and outlandish. At its worst, it calls into question the very salvation of any believer who doubts or even downplays PSA.
It also brings us to the third and most significant observation, which is that PSA really is a historical and doctrinal innovation. By “innovation” I do not mean that it has no precedent in Christian history before the Reformation, nor do I mean that its newness means it’s wrong. What I mean is that any honest study of church history must admit that the particular formulation of penal substitutionary atonement that came to birth with Luther and Calvin is genuinely new. So is the doctrinal centrality accorded it by the traditions these Reformers founded.
The theological mainstream of patristic and medieval writing on the atonement differs from PSA in important respects. It is an uncodified mix of (1) Christus Victor, whereby Christ destroys death by his own perfectly faithful death and resurrection from the grave; (2) a miraculous exchange of natures, so that the sheer fact of the Incarnation heals our sin-sick selves through the union of divinity and humanity in Jesus; and (3) deification or theosis, which proclaims that God became human that we might become divine.
To be sure, there are bits and pieces of language and concepts in these older works that resemble or intersect with PSA. But these are largely the flotsam and jetsam of other, far more popular and influential theological formulations of the atonement. Moreover, pro-PSA folks tend to oversell the obviousness of doctrine, claiming it to be Paul’s own direct teaching, the “clear” message of the New Testament.
Neither of these claims is necessary for PSA to be true, any more than the apostles had to recite the Nicene Creed for it to be faithful to their teaching. The formulation and articulation of doctrine takes time, and there is no reason to suppose the atonement is simpler to understand than the Trinity, which likewise took centuries to develop into the form we now take for granted.
The Bible speaks in many ways about God’s saving work in Christ, and PSA is one fitting, venerable, and spiritually powerful way of putting the scriptural pieces together. It is, in other words, a perfectly reasonable proposal for how to understand biblical teaching—even if one isn’t persuaded by it. After all, Luther and Calvin were razor-sharp exegetes. Perhaps they saw, for almost the first time, something no one else before them had quite seen. “When the Spirit of truth comes,” Jesus taught, “he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13).
At the same time, the fact that for centuries almost no Christians taught what we now recognize as PSA makes it implausible that this is the one clear atonement teaching of the New Testament. And this brings me back to my larger interest in talking about how we talk about PSA.
Theology is an ongoing conversation about how best to speak the gospel. It is, therefore, a perpetual debate until the Lord’s return. The problem is not disagreement. The problem is Christian critics and advocates talking past each other. The problem, in a word, is rhetorical points counting more than fairness, clarity, or mutual respect between groups of fellow believers.
When we debate theology, we are speaking of and with sisters and brothers who understand and explain our common Lord’s life, death, and resurrection in modestly different ways than we do. We can differ with respect. Even better, we can differ with mutual understanding. When we argue, we can do it as disciples of Christ—even if we walk away agreeing to disagree.
Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.
