A Philosophical Critique of Penal Substitution

Part 3 of 3 — Theological Letters

This piece is adapted from a podcast episode for readers who prefer written content over audio. While my typical written work includes extensive citations, I have not added formal references to this particular post. In addition, I have largely preserved my manner of speech, which can be a bit more colloquial than my usual writing style. Perhaps, when time permits, I’ll rewrite this piece in a more formal tone with proper citations. But in the meantime, the theological positions and historical claims presented here are sound and can be verified through standard patristic sources, particularly the works of the Eastern Church Fathers mentioned throughout. If you have yet to read the preceding two pieces in this series, I recommend you do so — links below.

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Before going on, please read part one and part two.

In this third installment, I want to examine some philosophical considerations — beginning with premises typically invoked as part of the penal substitution framework. I’ve mentioned several of these in prior posts: God must punish sin or else be unjust; Christ must be sinless because only someone with no moral infractions can take the punishment for another; as well as some from Anselm — that to take man’s punishment, the person must be human, but whoever delivers man, to him man is indebted; so the one to deliver man must also be God, since it would be unsuitable for man to be indebted to an angel, for example.

I raise these to point out that numerous philosophical premises come into play when attempting to justify and build the argument for penal substitution. For that reason, it’s perfectly suitable to examine whether these underlying premises hold water.

C. S. Lewis tips his hand in Mere Christianity, indicating he’s not a fan of the penal view. When discussing atonement and advocating instead for recapitulation — that the Son of God repents in man on behalf of man, walking him back to God — Lewis admits there was a time when he thought that to be a Christian, one had to hold to a certain understanding of atonement — clearly hinting at penal substitution. All he can say in its favor is that he now thinks it’s not quite so immoral as he once thought — hardly a raving endorsement.

For my part, I admit that, philosophically speaking, I find it wildly problematic. Consider some analogies that often accompany penal substitution. I heard one firsthand where someone told a story about his two sons: One had done something wrong and deserved a spanking, and the father wouldn't be good unless he followed through. But the other son, having heard about penal substitution, offered to take his brother's spanking for him. So, the father spanked the innocent son and let the guilty one go.

This exemplifies the problem with such analogies, namely, that the substitution is a moral injustice. Financial analogies tend to be more palatable: Imagine having an insurmountable student loan debt and someone else steps in to pay that debt out of love, clearing your account. Such an act displays love and compassion without violating our moral intuitions. But once you move from financial ramifications to judicial situations, things get dicier, and it becomes apparent that the notion applied in a judicial context is not merely unjust; it’s wildly unjust, making things worse, not better.

Consider a judge analogy sometimes used: I stand before a judge, guilty of some infraction. The judge rightly assesses my guilt and condemns me. But after condemning me, he removes his robes and offers himself to the bailiff to be taken away and punished in my place. This, supposedly, fulfills justice by condemning the guilty, ensuring punishment is rendered, and yet setting me free.

Upon careful scrutiny, however, the scenario proves wildly unjust. Let me adjust the analogy: Instead of me on trial, imagine my daughter has been sexually assaulted, and her attacker is on trial. The judge finds him guilty — because he is. The judge condemns this person but then says, I love this man so much that I’m going to let him back on the street and serve the prison sentance for sexual assault myself.

Clearly, this would be unjust. In fact, it would be a massive miscarriage of justice. If I witnessed this, I would not think, Well, at least someone’s in prison. Certainly not. The problem isn’t that we need someone somewhere imprisoned. The problem is that this person committed this crime, and this person needs to be removed from the streets; this person has forfeited his right to be amongst the broader civilization, and something needs to be done to rectify the situation.

Releasing the assailant onto the streets while imprisoning an innocent person does nothing to remedy the judicial problem. Now, we can debate whether imprisonment actually sets the cosmos right, but to whatever extent this mode of justice is suitable for setting the world right, our penal substitute has not set the world right. Our substitute has only compounded the injustice of our world by heaping upon this evil a miscarriage of justice — the guilty party condemned but set loose, and an innocent person imprisoned in his stead.

Far from demonstrating that the judge is supremely just, good, and loving, his deeds prove the opposite: He has gravely insulted those wrong, adding to their mistreatment, and his decision is an insult to justice herself.

This, of course, challenges one of the key premises often leveled in support of penal substitution, namely, that divine justice must punish someone. If we grant this premise, however, we must also acknowledge that justice means rendering to each his due. Justice is not a generic hammer blow that simply needs to hit someone somewhere. Quite the contrary, what differentiates justice from injustice is that punishment falls on the person who deserves it. If it falls on an innocent party, this blow is a miscarriage of justice.

I simply do not think the premise can survive scrutiny. For it suggests that what matters in the case of spanking, for example, is that the father’s hand strikes a bottom somewhere — whose bottom is irrelevant. But surely, this misses the point entirely. If spanking is an act of justice meant to punish and correct the one who has gone astray, then striking someone who has done nothing wrong and needs no correction, while letting off the guilty party, does not rectify the situation. It perpetuates injustice.

For this reason, I think the premise that God is Just and therefore cannot simply forgive sins but must pour out his wrath on someone somewhere is wildly misguided. It simply doesn’t hold water. Under scrutiny, it proves not only indefensible but gravely insulting to both justice and God.

The Problem of Divine Mercy

Another consequence of such thinking is that there can be no such thing as mercy — at least not for God. If mercy involves rendering a lenient punishment — not following through on the full extent of what is deserved and going easy on someone — then the premise about divine justice means God is incapable of mercy.

This is strange because Scripture ascribes mercy to God, describing him as long-suffering, patient, slow to anger, and abounding in love and kindness. On the penal view, if God goes easy on a person or lets him off the hook in any way, then he has not — and cannot — do so out of compassion or leniency. Instead, God always gets paid.

Using our financial metaphor: if I have debt and you decide to pay it because you love me, there’s nothing benevolent about the creditor who clears my account. The creditor got paid. He didn’t let me go because of his benevolence or mercy. He demanded every penny. You might have been gracious toward me by paying a debt you didn’t owe, showing me kindness and compassion. But your kindness and compassion is not mercy either, since my debt was not to you. The creditor is the only one who could show mercy, and he did not. And in this scenario, God is the creditor who cannot show mercy.

The premise that God, being just, must punish sin suggests that God needs every penny, every lash, and has no capacity for leniency or mercy. The only deliverance from God comes through Christ stepping in to take full punishment. So, on the penal view, God does not show mercy, nor can he: He gets paid in full because he must.

This seems, on the face of it, contrary to the biblical God.

Psychological Distortions

These premises raise a further problem I’ve observed firsthand among those deep entrenched in penal substitution: An unspoken (and sometimes spoken) tendency to say, I really love Jesus, and I'm comfortable with him, but God the Father is terrifying.

You can understand why this mental division would emerge. If you have a deity — God the Father — who cannot let you off the hook, who must punish every sin, who cannot show mercy, who needs to be paid with blood, and who considers every infraction, no matter how small, deserving of eternal torment, then obviously, that is a terrifying deity.

If the solution is that the Son of God steps in to take those lashes, you can see why, psychologically speaking, you’d find yourself with a mental division between the persons, thinking, I really like the second person who takes my lashes, showing love and compassion, but the first one, who must have someone to lash, is terrifying.

Imagine a family with a father who is exceedingly easy to anger and who has no concept of mercy, long-suffering, or patience, but must punish every infraction, the moment you step out of line. But in this family, you have a brother who is compassion and loving and is willing to step in and say, I know dad's going to beat you tonight, but I'll let him beat me instead. You probably would be endeared to your brother, but you’d be terrified of your father and likely see him as a tyrannical monster.

Candidly, the arrangement sounds like an extremely abusive relationship — a father who is a terror, needing to severely punish every infraction, but you’re shielded from his beatings by a benevolent brother who takes your lashes.

Many people indoctrinated into penal substitution walk around with an idea of God very much like this, where, in quiet moments or safe company, they might admit, I’m terrified of God the Father. But I really love Jesus and wish the Father was more like him.

The last bit is notable, of course, because the biblical understanding of Christ is that he is the perfect image of the Father. As Christ himself says, If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father. Or as Paul explains, Christ is the icon of the invisible God — an icon provided by God himself.

The idea that one might come away with two very different pictures of God — one of the Son and another contrasting picture of the Father — is utterly unbiblical. Yet, I don’t see how one can avoid this if he embraces penal substitution.

The view, of course, is rooted in a certain understanding of the biblical language about God being our enemy or about the wrath of God — the West reading this language as indicative of divine fury that penal substitution is meant to appease: Christ providing his own body as one on whom God might pour out his otherwise insatiable anger, thereby appeasing the Father and turning aside his anger toward us.

This understanding differs markedly from how the Eastern fathers understand such language — as discussed in my prior post. The Eastern fathers see us as enemies of God in the sense that we counted him as an enemy, rebelling against him, but his disposition toward us is one of love and desire for reconciliation and restoration. His wrath (again, as discussed in my prior post) is simply the effect of us turning away from the source of life, bringing corruption and death on ourselves as the natural consequence. It is not a commentary on God’s disposition toward us.

But in penal substitution, this language indicates that God is in fact angry — him counting us as enemies who are objects of his ire, needing to pour out eternal hellfire upon us to be satisfied. Hence the contrasting pictures of the Son and the Father that arise in the minds of many.

The Problem of Hell and Christ's Experience

This last point about eternal hellfire raises another difficulty in reconciling penal substitution with the Eastern patristic thought. The Eastern fathers largely understand Heaven and Hell — and even purgation and Hades — as carrying primarily allegorical meanings, referring to conditions of the soul.

For example, even though Eden (translated Paradise) is described as a garden, the real paradise of Eden was communion with God — that Adam and Eve were able to behold the divine glory. Such divine vision was what made Eden paradise. When they cut off that communion, even though their feet remained in the same location, they were immediately out of Eden by their own choosing, as Basil of Caesarea says.

Likewise, Hell, according to the Eastern fathers, is not primarily an extrinsic imposition of punishment but an internal condition of being so twisted, corrupted, and turned away from God that the divine presence becomes repugnant to the one who has so twisted himself. Basil of Caesarea discusses this when mentioning the twofold effect of the divine energies. He explains that the torments of hell have their source in us, not God. In other words, God is not actively torturing or inflicting pain upon any creature. The torments are not extrinsically imposed but intrinsic responses resulting from a corrupt state.

This also connects to something I’ve often discussed regarding Moses and Pharaoh. Notice that God treats Moses and Pharaoh identically: He shows up, declares who he is, demonstrates it by miracle, and makes a command. Yet, Moses becomes a saint, while Pharaoh hardens and cracks. Such is how the Eastern fathers understand the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. Far from forcing Pharaoh to disobey and then punishing him for such disobedience, God simply acknowledges how his presence will affect Pharaoh — knowing that Pharaoh thinks himself a god, the Lord God knows how Pharaoh will respond when told the God of gods wants him to let his people go. He will harden and crack, never relenting but choosing destruction. And so it is with the torments of Hell.

I raise this because the idea that Christ could experience Hell is impossible. Yet in penal substitution, this is crucial. You must suggest that Hell is something extrinsic — the outpouring of divine wrath and punishment for sins upon the person, and that very outpouring of wrath is what is heaped upon Christ.

But this contradicts how Eastern fathers understand this. God, being good and positively disposed toward his creatures, does not actively torture anyone forever. His disposition toward creatures is always toward their good — and according to the Eastern fathers, cannot be otherwise. But if the creature turns away and becomes twisted and resistant to God, then like Pharaoh, when God shows up, the effect will be negative.

The idea that Christ could experience this is impossible because Christ is in the bosom of the Father. There is no possibility of Christ experiencing what we call Hell. The idea that Christ would experience negative contact with the Father, or that the Father could ever be negatively disposed toward the Son, is impossible. The idea that God poured out the infinite torments of Hell upon Christ in a finite period of time — such as suggested by Jonathan Edwards — is impossible. Christ, the second person of the Trinity, cannot experience such things because they result from inner corruption, which Christ is immune to.

In short, the very proposal contemplates a scenario that the Eastern fathers would deem a metaphysical impossibility.

The Universalism Problem

Even entertaining the Western notion of atonement — that God has a storehouse of punishments to pour out for humanity's demerits, and he pours those upon his Son instead of us — creates a real problem that Calvinists recognize: If Christ absorbed the punishment for all, how could anyone else ever be condemned?

Here’s the problem: If the theory is that God must punish sins, and I have a certain storehouse of sins that God must punish, and God gets me off the hook by pouring every jot and tittle of wrath owed to me upon Christ, then I can go free — no wrath remains for me. That’s how we set the world right on this view.

But if Jesus dies for everyone’s sins, then everyone should be saved — full stop. This is a genuine problem for all except the universalist. If all sins of humanity, all punishment owed to every human being, have been poured out on Christ, and that is the gospel you preach, then why must I or anyone else accept it? Hasn’t the debt been paid, regardless of what I believe? Shouldn’t I arrive at the judgment to find my account cleared?

Calvinists are attuned to this, which is why they have a doctrine of limited atonement — defended at length in John Owen’s treatise The Death of Death. The doctrine acknowledges the point: If Christ has endured punishment for someone’s sins, then they’re off the hook. There’s no more punishment to pour out.

Since not all are saved, according to the Calvinist, God has predestined — chosen in advance who he will save and who he will damn. Therefore, Jesus only died for the elect. That’s the bitter pill many Calvinists swallow: Jesus did not die for all but only for those God has chosen to save. Everyone else’s sins still rest upon their shoulders, and for those sins, they will be eternally damned.

Many people familiar with their Bibles but not with Calvinism are shocked by this because of biblical texts that say plainly that God loves the world, Christ died for all, and God wills all to be saved. Calvinists must deal with such texts, of course, by arguing that Christ died for “the many” — that is, the elect — not for all.

This creates the awkward peculiarity where you might be preaching to someone about the love of Christ and his atoning work, but you don’t actually know if Christ died for their sins — maybe God doesn't love them and Christ didn’t die for them. According to Calvinism, you might be talking to a reprobate for whom Jesus did not die.

For the broader Christian community who aren’t Calvinists but advocate penal substitution, however, the question remains: How do you resolve this without advocating universalism? The only explanation I’ve heard is that Christ died for every sin except the unpardonable sin. They appeal to Christ’s discussion of an unpardonable sin — blasphemy against the Holy Spirit — and argue that this one particular sin won’t be forgiven. So what is this sin? On this reading, the sin is rejecting Jesus as your savior. If you reject Christ, then that one unpaid sin is the reason for your eternal damnation — the others have been paid for.

This is the only broader view I’ve encountered on the matter. Now, putting aside whether this squares with the biblical text — for example, that specific sins are named when recounting who is in the Lake of Fire — the fact remains that an advocate of penal substitution who wishes to deny universalism must offer some explanation for the condition of faith. Without it, you run into the problem of double jeopardy: The person is judged by God and damned for sins that Jesus already paid for. If it is in fact possible for Jesus to take the punishment of another, then to carry out that punishment a second time is plainly unjust. So, why the condition of faith? If someone paid off my credit card, what does it matter whether I acknowledge their generosity or not? It has been paid — objectively.

As I’ve said, advocates of penal substitution have a couple of options — limited atonement or the unpardonable sin. Whether either scares with Scripture is another matter, but the problem of double jeopardy when rejecting universalism is quite real for one who believes Jesus as already paid for every sin.

Rethinking Justice and Punishment

Finally, I want to address the notion of punishment. I’ve hinted that I’m unconvinced that retributive justice sets the world right. I’m not discussing prison reform or whether there are social reasons to take someone off the street, and I understand that in the case of financial wrongdoing, repayment makes a great deal of sense when righting the wrong.

But moral infractions are much more difficult to set right because, in many cases, there’s no going back and undoing the thing that has gone wrong. What stands out to me when I look at Eastern Church fathers and Eastern Saints is that their focus is less on forgiveness, in the sense of clearing an account, and more on setting the world right.

One consistent premise in the Latin West and Protestantism is that God cannot just forgive sins. This, of course, is a major problem for anyone familiar with biblical texts where God often forgives sins in the Old Testament, well before Christ dies on the cross. King David is absolved by God, his sins taken away, after committing murder and adultery — acts that, under the OT Law, should not be forgiven but result in capital punishment. Yet God simply absolves him. Christ, too, forgives a great many sins before his passion.

One way to reconcile this is to say something like, the shadow of the cross fell backwards on these sins. So, God forgives these infractions in anticipation that they’ll be laid on Christ eventually.

But what's interesting is that certain parables Christ offers simply don’t fit the premise that God cannot forgive sins. Consider the story of the unmerciful servant — a man owing a great debt that he can’t possibly pay is brought before the ruler he owns the debt. The man asks for time to pay it back — even though everyone knows the amount is impossible to repay — and the ruler shows mercy, forgiving his debt. Of course, the proper response is deep gratitude that overflows into generosity toward others — If anyone owes me anything, I’ll surely be gracious with them. Instead, the man meets someone who owes him very little and starts strangling him, demanding payment and threatening to throw him in prison. When the ruler who had forgiven this man hears about it, he calls him back and throws the unmerciful man in prison until he pays the last penny.

In this story, God is clearly the ruler who forgives the debt. But what happens? First, he simply forgives the debt — no substitute payments. Second, when he hears of the man’s conduct, he re-invokes the debt. Under penal substitution, none of this is possible: The ruler would need someone to pay the debt, and once paid, there is no re-invoking it.

This, I think, is why the Eastern Church Fathers display no anxiety over the question of how God might forgive sins. You and I forgive sins all the time. You can sin against me and I forgive you and vice versa. Surely God can forgive me for wrongs against him. The problem we face is not forgiveness.

A different problem is at work in the world: Death and corruption. What’s interesting is that the main concern of the Eastern fathers — what they believe God is primary concerned with — is that you become what you are made to be. The problem isn’t that two years ago you committed a transgression that still requires lashes. The problem is that you and I are twisted and not (yet) what we were made to be. The concern is that you and I are not yet Saints, and the driving desire is to see you become precisely that — free of corruption and fully alive. That is what sets the world right.

Intuitively, we understand this. When we see a movie with a villain or someone who fails, and they find their way back through a redemption story, ultimately becoming someone willing to lay down their life for another, showing they’ve become something different than the failure we saw before — that is what sets things right. The rightness is not about accounting or exactitude.

This contrast is what stands out most to me: So much of penal substitution involves accounting, a bean-counter mentality saying something is out of balance, something hasn't been paid, something done must be paid back — a balancing of accounts, merits and demerits.

Contrast this with what you see in the Christian East: God being provident, the Good God is primarily concerned with his creatures becoming what they are made to be. If they go astray, becoming corrupt and harming the cosmos, yes, he wishes to repair his cosmos, but his primary concern is seeing that creature set right and brought back in line with what it is made to be, to attain its proper end. As for damage the creature do to the cosmos, the concern is the same — to see those things healed and restored to their proper ends as well.

This is the real key: God's justice, love, mercy, goodness, and providence are all aimed at one thing — the good of the creature, bringing the cosmos to the state it is made to be, seeing it attain proper formation and its proper end.

Truthfully, when looking at stories of Saints, their journeys do more to set the world right than any exactitude of punishment. Consider a courtroom where someone has murdered or raped someone and the judge pronounces judgment, sending the guilty party to prison. This does not actually right the world. The world is still deeply scarred, with people having been harmed. Nothing has been repaired.

It may be necessary for the protection of society — we can discuss practical reasons why this form of human justice might make sense. But this particular act of justice doesn’t correct the world or right what has gone wrong. No matter how long you imprison a person, it doesn’t restore the world or set things right.

But you do see the world set right in the life of a Saint. Take St. Mary of Egypt, for example — a girl who ran away from home, became a nymphomaniac, poured herself into depraved sexual acts with everyone and everything she encountered, probably doing great violence to countless souls, her own soul, to relationships, and to the world. Yet, at some point, confronted by God, she repented deeply, went into the desert, sought God, who restored her soul, and in her deep repentance, she found eternal life and rest, becoming a Saint, a model of repentance and restoration for the rest of the world that has inspired generations to pursue God.

That actually sets the world right. There’s no part of me that looks at that story and says, Yeah, but we need to track her down and give her a beating for the violence she did to various souls. No, what sets the world right is seeing her healed, restored, and deified to a degree that few of us can even imagine. That is the only way to redeem her history.

The same is true for everyone with whom she engaged in sin. If they, too, undergo repentance and restoration, that begins to set that corner of the world right.

This always stands out to me about the Eastern fathers. They understand that what sets the world right is not tit-for-tat accounting or punishment for every infraction. Rather, the only thing that sets the world right is seeing God’s creatures restored, healed, and brought to their proper end. That is how they understand the work of Christ: Setting the world right is what Christ came into the world to do, and why he gave himself for the life of the world.