Penal Substitution

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 judgement as coinciding.  Divine judgement 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.”  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…

From: “What Did the Cross Achieve: The Logic of Penal Substitution,” in The Collected Shorter Writings of J. I. Packer: Volume 1: Celebrating the Saving Work of God by James I. Packer (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1998), pp. 108-109.  This article was originally published in 1974.

 

J. I. Packer Week – 5

The penal substitution model has been criticized for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make Him love men, 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 of our sins” (1 John 4:8-10, KJV).  “God shows His love for us in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 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” (Galatians 2:20).  “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down His life for His friends.  You are my friends…” (John 15:13-14).  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 [James] Denney – “that, in that dark hour, He had to realize, to the full, the divine reaction against sin in the race.”

From: “What Did the Cross Achieve?” in The Collected Shorter Writings of J. I. Packer: Volume 1: Celebrating the Saving Work of God by J. I. Packer (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1998), pp. 118-119.  “What Did the Cross Achieve?” was originally published in the Tyndale Bulletin, Volume 25 (1974), pp. 1-43.