Is Penal Substitution Biblical?

What Penal Substitution Teaches

Penal substitutionary atonement is the explanation of the cross taught in many Reformed and evangelical churches. Its teachers put it this way. God is holy and just, and his justice requires that sin be punished. Jesus, the sinless Son of God, took that punishment in our place on the cross. God’s wrath against our sin was poured out on him and satisfied there, so God can forgive those who believe and remain just. “Penal” means that a penalty was paid. “Substitutionary” means that Jesus paid it instead of us.

The view has deep roots in Protestant teaching. The Heidelberg Catechism teaches that Christ bore, in body and soul, the wrath of God against the sin of the whole human race. The Westminster Confession says that Christ fully satisfied the justice of his Father, and that believers are justified when his obedience and satisfaction are counted to them. Wayne Grudem’s widely used Systematic Theology defines Christ’s death in the same terms.

Its defenders give serious biblical reasons. Isaiah 53 speaks of a servant who suffers for the transgressions of others. Paul says that God set Christ forth “to be a propitiation through faith in his blood,” so that God “might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (Romans 3:25–26), and he says it right after a long passage on God’s wrath against all sin. The wages of sin is death, and Christ died. Leon Morris argued that the Greek words for propitiation carried the sense of turning away anger. Jay Sklar argued from Leviticus that the sacrificial life served as a ransom that God agreed to accept in place of the worshiper’s life. Many faithful Christians hold this view because they believe Scripture teaches it.

What the Book Shares With the View

How Atonement Works agrees with a great deal of this. Christ died for us and in our place. Our sins were laid on him, and he bore them. Sin is serious enough that it cost the Son of God his life. God’s wrath against sin is real, and those who are in Christ will be saved from it. The cross was necessary, and Christ’s sacrifice was offered once for all.

The difference concerns how the cross worked. Penal substitution says that it worked by the Father punishing Jesus in place of sinners, and that this punishment is what makes forgiveness possible. Chapter 19 of the book argues that this part of the explanation is wrong, and sets out eight objections, each beside the main replies of the view’s defenders. It is a disagreement among Christians about the mechanism of the atonement. Those who hold penal substitution trust the same Christ and the same cross.

Were the Sacrifices in Leviticus Punishments?

Penal substitution reads the Old Testament sacrifices as pictures of an animal punished in the worshiper’s place. In Leviticus the animal had to be without blemish (Leviticus 1:3; 4:3), so an animal that had been beaten or wounded could not be offered at all. The law gives no instruction to make it suffer. The animal was killed, and the law then turns to what the priest did with its blood at the altar. The priests’ service kept wrath from breaking out against the people (Numbers 18:5), and no passage says that God’s wrath fell on the animals offered there.

Atonement was also made for things that cannot be punished, and for a person who had done nothing wrong. Once the mold in a house had stopped spreading, the priest made atonement for the house (Leviticus 14:48–53). The altar, the holy place, and the tent received atonement every year (Leviticus 16:16–20, 33). A woman after childbirth needed atonement when she had no sin to confess (Leviticus 12:7–8). The law’s word for what the rite did in these cases is “cleanse,” and Leviticus gives the purpose of the Day of Atonement in the same word:

For on that day shall the priest make an atonement for you, to cleanse you, that ye may be clean from all your sins before the LORD.

Leviticus 16:30

Some defenders answer, following Sklar, that the animal’s life was a ransom, a lesser penalty that God was free to accept or refuse. The book answers that even on this reading God’s wrath does not fall on the animal. What decides the outcome is God’s choice to accept less than the penalty, from a gift he himself provided.

Two Goats: Which One Carried the Sins?

Penal substitution pictures sin placed on a victim who is then killed for it. On the Day of Atonement those two acts happen to two different animals. Aaron cast lots over two goats. The goat for the LORD was killed, and its blood was carried behind the veil and sprinkled on the mercy seat to cleanse the holy place (Leviticus 16:15–16). No sins were confessed over it. Aaron then laid both hands on the second goat, confessed over it “all the iniquities of the children of Israel,” and sent it away alive:

And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness.

Leviticus 16:22

This is the only rite in the law in which sins are said to be placed on an animal. In the ordinary offerings the worshiper laid one hand on the animal, and the law says the offering would be “accepted for him to make atonement for him” (Leviticus 1:4), with no mention of sins passing to it. Chris White proposes that a goat carrying Israel’s sins could not have supplied the blood that cleansed the sanctuary, because what cleanses has to be clean.

Defenders reply that the two goats were one sin offering (Leviticus 16:5). The book agrees that the rite was incomplete without both. The unity of the rite still leaves the sins on the goat that lived. The earliest Christian writers on Leviticus 16, Barnabas, Justin Martyr, and Tertullian, also kept the two goats distinct and saw both as pictures of Christ. Hebrews uses the language of the second goat when it says that Christ was “once offered to bear the sins of many” (Hebrews 9:28).

Blood Atones by the Life in It

One verse in Leviticus explains why blood atones:

For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.

Leviticus 17:11

The book reads this verse to say that blood atones by the life in it. God gave the life for the altar, and the priest applied it to what sin and death had made unclean. Chapter 4 works through the Hebrew of the last clause, which many modern translations render “by reason of the life.” On that reading the rite is a cleansing, and its result is that God can go on dwelling among his people.

Defenders of the penal view read the verse differently. Leon Morris argued that “blood” in the Old Testament stands for life violently taken, so that what the altar received was a death. The book answers that the verse names the life and makes no mention of a death. Both sides agree that the animal had to die and the blood had to be shed, since “without shedding of blood is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22). They differ over whether the blood counts as the death or as the life.

The law also makes atonement where no death takes place. Aaron stopped a plague with incense, and the text calls it atonement (Numbers 16:46–48). The half-shekel paid at the census made “an atonement for your souls” (Exodus 30:12–16). A poor Israelite could bring flour as his sin offering, and he was forgiven (Leviticus 5:11–13). These cases are hard to fit with an account in which atonement is at bottom a death suffered in our place.

Both sides, in their own words. Chapter 19 of How Atonement Works quotes the confessions and teachers of penal substitution, then gives eight biblical objections with their defenders’ replies. The rest of the book traces the Day of Atonement through the work of Christ: the blood, the high priest in heaven, the scapegoat, and the defeat of the devil.

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God’s Wrath and Romans 3:25

God’s wrath is real, and the New Testament speaks of it often. It most often speaks of it as still to come: “the wrath to come” (1 Thessalonians 1:10), “the day of wrath” (Romans 2:5). Believers will be saved from it:

Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.

Romans 5:9–10

If God’s wrath against our sins was spent on Jesus at the cross, it is hard to see why Paul places our rescue from it in the future and ties it to Christ’s life as well as his death. No verse in the New Testament says that the wrath of God was poured out on Jesus. Since the apostles speak of God’s wrath so often, Chris White would expect at least one of them to say so if it had happened.

Defenders answer that the teaching is present in passages that use other words, above all Romans 3:25. Their case rests on more than the English word “propitiation.” Morris argued that the Greek word family was used for turning away anger, that Paul has just described God’s wrath against all sin (Romans 1:18–3:20), and that God acted so that he “might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (3:26).

The Greek word Paul used is the word the Greek Old Testament uses for the lid of the Ark, the mercy seat, where the high priest sprinkled the blood. Hebrews uses it for the same object: “the cherubims of glory shadowing the mercyseat” (Hebrews 9:5). Chris White takes Paul to mean that God set Christ forth as the place where atonement is made through his blood. In the Old Testament accounts where atonement stops God’s wrath, such as Aaron’s incense in Numbers 16, no one receives the wrath in the people’s place.

Does God Forgive Without Payment?

Penal substitution rests on a principle that Anselm of Canterbury stated in the eleventh century and the Reformers kept: it is not right for God to cancel sin without compensation or punishment. Scripture shows God forgiving the repentant many times with no payment. He spared Nineveh when its people turned from their evil way (Jonah 3:10). He told Solomon the terms on which he forgives his people:

If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

2 Chronicles 7:14

Through Isaiah he said, “I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake” (Isaiah 43:25). Jesus forgave the paralytic and the woman in Simon’s house (Mark 2:5; Luke 7:48). In his parable the king, “moved with compassion,” forgave his servant the debt without collecting it from anyone (Matthew 18:27). Paul tells believers to forgive “even as Christ forgave you” (Colossians 3:13).

Defenders reply that God forgave these people in view of the cross to come, and that forgiveness is free to us because God paid the price himself, in his Son. The book agrees that our forgiveness cost God his Son. It answers that a debt the creditor pays to himself is still treated as a debt that had to be paid, while Scripture’s own words for what God does with sin are forgive, pardon, blot out, and remove. Morris himself held that in the Old Testament the removal of God’s wrath comes in the end from God, and the book concludes that what turns wrath away rests on God’s own free choice.

Three Further Questions

Who was condemned?

Calvin taught that Christ bore the punishment we deserved, and he also denied that the Father was ever angry with his beloved Son. The church confessed at Chalcedon that Christ is one person, the eternal Son, in two natures. The book asks how God’s anger against our sins could fall on the Son if the Father was never angry with him, and whether one divine person can pass sentence on another. Defenders answer that the Father and the Son act together and that the Son willingly offered himself. The book replies, with Drew Whitton, that a willing condemnation is still a condemnation of the Son.

Why does forgiveness need the resurrection?

If Christ bore the whole penalty at the cross, the resurrection serves mainly as proof that the payment was accepted. Paul gives it a larger place: “if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). Hebrews describes the risen Christ entering heaven “by his own blood” to appear in the presence of God for us (Hebrews 9:12, 24). The article Why Does the Resurrection Matter for Forgiveness? explains this in more detail.

What does justice require?

Proverbs says that “he that condemneth the just” is “abomination to the LORD” (Proverbs 17:15), and the law says that “every man shall be put to death for his own sin” (Deuteronomy 24:16). The usual reply is that Christ consented and that his union with his people makes the transfer just. The book grants that his consent shows his willingness and that union with him explains how his work counts for us, and it argues that neither makes it just to condemn the innocent. It also observes that Scripture describes the penalty for the unrepentant as final, while Christ’s suffering ended in his resurrection on the third day.

Where This Understanding Comes From

Careful readers of Scripture have raised these questions for a long time. David M. Moffitt’s work on Leviticus and Hebrews argues that inflicting suffering was no part of biblical sacrifice, that the live goat is the one animal said to carry sins, and that Christ’s offering includes his entrance into heaven. Jacob Milgrom’s commentary on Leviticus explains the sacrificial blood as purging the sanctuary. William Milligan argued in 1892 that the death of the victim cannot explain the whole offering. Richard Barry has studied how Barnabas, Justin Martyr, and Tertullian read the two goats, and Drew Whitton has examined penal substitution in light of Chalcedon and union with Christ. The book also engages the view’s strongest defenders, among them Leon Morris, Jay Sklar, Garry Williams, and Anthony Petterson. How Atonement Works builds on this scholarship and credits it.