Penal substitution

The penalty borne in our place

‘Penal’ refers to a penalty, ‘substitution’ to one taking another's place. Isaiah sang of a servant who suffers for the sins of others:

But He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. We all like sheep have gone astray, each one has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid upon Him the iniquity of us all.

Isaiah 53:5–6

The New Testament applies the song to Jesus. "He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree" (1 Peter 2:24); he suffered "the righteous for the unrighteous" (1 Peter 3:18). "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us" (Galatians 3:13), and God "made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf" (2 Corinthians 5:21). So God does not overlook sin, and yet acts "so as to be just and to justify the one who has faith in Jesus" (Romans 3:26).

The church's teaching

The thought of Christ dying in our stead is already in the Fathers. Athanasius taught that the Word took a body capable of death so that he might surrender it to death in the place of all Athanasius, On the Incarnation. The Reformers spelled it out in terms of penalty. Calvin taught that Christ stood in the sinner's place and took upon himself the curse and condemnation that were ours Calvin, Institutes 2.16, and the Belgic Confession says that he

suffered the just for the unjust, as well in his body as in his soul, feeling the terrible punishment which our sins had merited

Belgic Confession, art. 21

John Wesley, on Isaiah 53:5, writes that "Those punishments by which our peace, our reconciliation to God, was to be purchased, were laid upon him by God's justice with his own consent" Wesley. The teaching takes up Anselm's satisfaction theory but says that Christ satisfied God's justice precisely by bearing the punishment.

Objections and answers

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Socinians rejected the teaching, arguing that forgiveness which has been paid for is not free forgiveness. Some critics today call it a story of a Father punishing an innocent Son. Its defenders answer that Scripture never sets the Father against the Son but shows one love of the triune God. The Son said, "I lay it down of My own accord" (John 10:18), and God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself (2 Corinthians 5:19). Matthew Henry, on Galatians 3:13, says Christ was made a curse for us, "not separated from God, but laid for a time under the Divine punishment" Matthew Henry.

The Orthodox churches generally speak of the cross less in terms of penalty than of Christ's victory over death and his healing of human nature, and the Catholic Church teaches Christ's death as a sacrifice and satisfaction offered in our place. Among evangelicals, many hold penal substitution to be the centre of the atonement; others set it among several pictures or put the picture of victory first. In the seventeenth century Hugo Grotius, followed by some Arminians, explained Christ's sufferings less as the penalty itself than as a public display of God's justice against sin. The question is taken further in Why did Jesus have to die? and the lesson The cross and atonement (see also atonement).