Reclaiming the Atonement: Problems with Penal Substitution

Part 2 of 3 — Theological Letters

Greetings subscribers! Last week’s post, which was well received, was the transcript of my podcast episode on atonement and penal substitution, exploring the contrasts between the Christian East and West on doctrine (search: The Nathan Jacobs Podcast). That episode was the first of two episodes on the subject. Given the positive reception of the first episode, I’ve decided to offer to you, dear readers, a transcript of the second episode, which reconsiders the Western understanding of certain biblical language in the light of the Eastern fathers as well as philosophical challenges to the cogency of the Western view. Because this second episode was so long, I’ve broken it into two parts. Today’s post is thus the first half. The second will drop next Sunday.

The same caveats apply to this week’s post as applied to last week. To wit, while my written work typically includes extensive citations and footnotes, I have not added formal references to this particular post because it is a transcript. In addition, I have largely preserved my manner of speech, which is a bit different than my typical writing style. Hence, you may notice artifacts of the spoken word that would not typically appear in my written words. 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.

To all my subscribers, thank you for subscribing. To my paid subscribers, thank you for your support. And to any visitors, please consider subscribing and supporting my work. Enjoy!

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Before going on, please read part one.

Having explored the fundamental differences between Eastern and Western approaches to the atonement, we can now delve into some deeper questions. How should we read biblical passages about atonement if we’re not reading them through the lens of penal substitution? What did the Church Fathers actually say, and how do we avoid projecting later Western developments onto their writings? And what are some philosophical problems with penal substitution we should consider?

These questions matter because many who have grown up in a Western Christian context—Protestant, Catholic, or even those who have simply absorbed Western Christian culture—often wear thick interpretive lenses such that they assume Christianity is fundamentally about future judgment, with Christ paying for humanity’s sins in some judicial sense. When they encounter those outside this tradition, they struggle to see any other possible meaning.

The Problem of Interpretive Lenses

This issue of interpretive lenses is critical. Common is the disposition to be so familiar with penal substitution, and only with penal substitution, that when looking at a certain passage or phrase, the reader sees only one possible reading. Suddenly, a passage that may not be terribly specific becomes pregnant with meaning because the reader is bringing a great deal of baggage to it.

Allow me to offer an analogy. Imagine a tale in which you’re diagnosed with some debilitating disease, and there’s only one cure—a rare plant that only grows in one place on earth, high atop a treacherous mountain. You’re condition makes it impossible for you to make the journey yourself.

Yet, in our story, I’m a world-renown mountain climber. I know this particular mountain will be a challenge—this being the one mountain I have yet to scale—but I'm willing to climb it because of my love for you. So the journey begins, and it’s harrowing. I nearly die multiple times. But finally, I manage to reach the summit and retrieve the plant. Upon my return, I’m bloodied and bruised, but with great delight, I announce that I found what you need. We transform the plant into the required medicine, and you’re restored to health.

In such a tale, we could talk about me suffering on your behalf. We could say that my suffering brought you peace. We could talk about me enduring the pains of your illness in my own body. We could construct all sorts of poetic and meaningful language that would truly describe the sacrifice I made to make you whole.

But none of that language, rich as it may be, would imply or require that you were owed punishment before a judge and I stepped in to take your lashes. The point is this. Robust substitute language about someone suffering on another’s behalf need not imply a penal substitute.

What happens often with biblical language, however, is that folks are so accustomed to understanding the Christian gospel as penal substitution that whenever they read substitute language—about Christ suffering for our sins, or bearing our punishment, or enduring things for our sakes—the only thing they can see is penal substitution. No other way of reading such language occurs to them. Yet there are any number of ways substitute language could be used without implying judicial substitution.

How the Eastern Fathers Used Key Terms

A key aspect of interpretation is how we understand common biblical terms. The Eastern Church Fathers are a helpful resource here because they are native Greek speakers who know this culture and language and relevant texts in a way different from any of us who come to them as outsiders. When we look at how these fathers interpret certain words, we find that they do not always read them the ways we do. Consider a few examples.

Sin. In our Western context, largely due to Latin influence, sin is typically taken to mean something moral—I have committed a moral infraction of some kind. With this, there’s a tendency to differentiate sin in the singular from sins in the plural, where sin refers to original sin (the condition that makes me a sinner) and sins are the specific moral infractions that result.

When we look at the Eastern Church Fathers, they do not treat the word sin in this way. In John Chrysostom’s Homilies on Romans, for example, he takes Paul’s talk of sin to mean corruption or death.

You may have heard that the term sin comes from archery, referring to a missing of the mark. That way of thinking about the term moves closer to what we find in someone like Chrysostom, where the word signifies corruption.

The term corruption (phthora) indicates that something is divergent from proper formation. If we take the human eye as an example, we understand that a properly formed eye has a proper telos or end, namely, to see. Yet, if something goes awry in the formation of the eye such that it’s warped and has trouble seeing—its vision is fuzzy or it goes blind—we could refer to this as a corruption, some sort of malformation that diverges from its proper form and function.

Sin (hamartia) was another term used to indicate some sort of corruption or divergence from proper formation. Looked at in this way, the term doesn’t necessarily require moral connotations at all. If an animal is born with a gimp leg, that is a corruption—a malformation in the leg of that animal. This broder meaning of the term is the use in the Eastern Church Fathers.

Now, are moral infractions sin? Of course. When we morally transgress and retreat from God, operating in ways that are wicked or vicious, we distort our humanity, diverging from our proper formation. Such deeds are rightly labeled sin. But the reason is ontological, not moral.

This is one reason why sin is sometimes treated in figures like Chrysostom as synonymous with death. Death can simply mean that my soul leaves my body, ending its animation, but it can also signify the corruption at work in our members as a result of the Fall. So, it should come as no surprise, that corruption, death, and sin were often treated as interchangeable terms.

Wrath. In a Latin and Western context generally, wrath tends to carry connotations of anger—and great and zealous anger at that. Think, for example, of Jonathan Edwards’ famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” When talking about the wrath of God, then, what comes to mind for many is that God is exceedingly angry or furious with us.

When you look at the Eastern fathers, however, wrath is more of a negative effect or consequence of something unholy coming into contact with God, who is Holy. But as for God’s disposition toward the sinner, that disposition is not in fact wrathful in the way we might describe wrath—in the sense of being angry or furious or negatively disposed toward the individual.

You can see this in Basil of Caesarea, who talks rather candidly about the torments of Hell having their cause in us, not in God. He talks about the presence or energies of God—his glory—having a double effect: to the righteous and those properly disposed toward God, the presence is pleasing, whereas it is exceedingly unpleasant to the wicked, who hate God. In other words, the negative effect has its source in the wicked’s disposition toward God, not God’s disposition toward the wicked.

Whenever talking about the disposition of God toward the wicked, by contrast, the Eastern fathers insist that His disposition is loving, desiring their good. This goes to a critical feature of Eastern patristic thought, namely, the way they understand divine Goodness and Providence.

They talk rather consistently about God being Good—not in a vague sense that whatever God happens to do is good, but in an ontologically grounded sense. What I mean is this. Everything that God has made has a certain nature—an eye, an ear, a leaf. And when a creature is properly formed, it naturally attains its proper end or purpose—a leaf for photosynthesis, an eye for seeing, an ear for hearing.

The notion of divine Goodness is that God wills the good of everything. When the Eastern fathers talk about God being good, they are identifying him as the Good—the source of all lesser goods, articulated in our world—but they also mean that he wills the good of each and every creature, that he wills for each creature to be properly formed and attain its telos or proper end. In fact, they go so far as to insist that God cannot will otherwise.

When talking about divine providence, they have in mind God’s care for nature, which orders it and works to bring all things to their proper end. And again, God can will none other.

This is something I talk about at length in my series on the problem of evil—the way the Eastern Church Fathers insist that God antecedently wills the good of every being, and evil is only ever permitted by God because God cannot affirmatively will evil. He can only will your good.

The reason I raise this is because when talking about God’s disposition toward the wicked, the Eastern fathers insist that God’s resolve to bring about the good of the creature does not and cannot change, no matter our sins. In Gregory of Nyssa’s Homilies on the Lord’s Prayer, he offers a lengthy passage on how to read Old Testament passages that speak with zeal about the destruction of the wicked.

Gregory suggests—and the point is echoed in Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Origen—that it would be blasphemous to attribute to God passions of vengeance to God, such that God desires anything less than their good. His point is not simply that the notion is false, but that it is metaphysically impossible. For such a reading would indict the Goodness of God, making the suggestion blasphemous.

Of course, the question naturally arises: How, then, are we to read these Old Testament passages where prophets and psalmists call for God to destroy the wicked and wipe them out, so that their place remembers them no more?

Gregory answers that we must first dispel any notion of vengeance, such that might fail to desire the good of his creatures. Instead, we should read them with an eye fixed on what we know of God: He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked but desires them to turn and live. Gregory, of course, is not pulling the notion from thin air; the prophet Ezekiel says as much, and St. Paul says plainly that God desires all to be saved. Knowing this, we can rest assured that our reading has gone awry if it implies that takes pleasure in the death of the wicked.

How, then, are we to read such passages? According to Gregory, we should read them in the light of what we know of God—that his aim for every creature, even the wicked, is for their restoration, that they would repent and be healed. When calling to bring an end to the wicked, such that their place remembers them no more and when we look for them, we do not find them, Gregory suggests that we should read this plea for their repentance. Why? Because were they to repent, they would no longer be wicked but righteous. In this way, the wicked are brought to an end. And when we search for them, we cannot find them. For they are now counted amongst the righteous.

This is one reason why wrath is not read as anger by the Eastern fathers: God cannot be negatively disposed toward his creatures but always desires and wills and works toward their good. Not recognizing this, some translations of these fathers fall into odd tensions on the point. I think, for example, of a passage in Chrysostom where the translator talks about God being angry with us right before speaking about God’s loving disposition toward us that impels him to send his Son. But the language is less tortured when read as God being lovingly disposed toward our good, despite us bringing upon ourselves corruption and death by turning away from him. But because God wills our good, he sends his son to redeem and heal us.

Mediator. A common tendency, certainly in an American context but growing out of our Western Latin roots, is to read mediator as somebody who stands between. Two parties are alienated from one another, both harboring animosity, unable to see eye to eye and come to peaceable agreement. So, a neutral third party steps into that gap in order to help them come to some sort of resolution or reconciliation.

This way of thinking ends up projected onto the biblical language about the work of Christ: we are estranged from God—we being in rebellion and him being angered by our offenses—and Christ steps into this gap, persuading us to lay down our arms and advocating before God the Father to lay down his.

Such, however, is not the language of mediator (mesitēs) in Greek, nor is it the language of mediator in the Eastern Church fathers. The language of mediator here means something closer to a bridge or a conduit between two things.

Here, the distinction between a thing’s essence and its energies—a distinction common in the New Testament and critical to Eastern patristic thought—is especially helpful. The distinction differentiates the nature of a that or what it is (the essence) from the operative powers that express or articulate that nature (its energies). A favorite analogy of the Eastern fathers is the analogy of fire and metal. Fire expresses its pyrotic nature through the operative powers or energies of heating and lighting. Now, things with a combustable nature are resistant to these energies. But other natures are receptive to them. Iron, for example, is able to commune with fire, and in communing with fire, it can participate in its energies, taking into itself the operative powers of heating and lighting—such that if you remove the iron from the fire, it glows and burns, having taken these energies into itself.

Now, let’s tweak this image slightly. Rather than iron in some generic shape, let’s imagine the iron is for branding—say, forming the letters N.A.J. (my initials). I heat the branding iron in fire, it begins to glow and burn, and I carry it to a cow in order to brand it. We might ask, Which is burning the cow? the iron or the fire?

The answer is both. The act is synergistic—two operating in one act. On the one hand, the operative power to burn belongs to fire. On the other hand, the entire reason why those energies are expressed the way they are, producing the specific shape, and the reason they are in proximity to burn the cow is owed to the iron. The two energies are joined in one subject, the branding iron.

This picture comes much closer to the language of mediator amongst the Eastern fathers. A mediator is one who serves as a bridge between two thing or serves as a conduit for them.

When Chrysostom comments on St. Paul's phrase that there is one mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ, Chrysostom does not have in mind something about negotiations or appeasement. Instead, what he takes Paul to mean is that there is only one person who has united in himself divinity and humanity, rebuilding the bridge between humanity and the eternal life of God, and that person is Christ.

Only the second person of the Trinity bore in his person the nature of God the Father and took on our broken humanity, healing and restoring our nature by uniting it with the eternal life of God. In this sense, he is the one mediator, or conduit, who alone has bridged the gap between Fallen man and God by unting the two in his person.

Needless to say, the meaning is notably different than two estranged parties who are in a spat and need someone to step in and resolve the dispute.

Reading Scripture Through Eastern Eyes

Once you begin to shift your perspective on these sorts of terms—terms like sin, wrath, and mediator—you begin to see that maybe the common proof texts for the judicial view don’t carry the sort of connotations we might presume if only familiar with penal substitution.

No doubt you can find in the Eastern fathers echoes of biblical language about Christ dying for our sins, or suffering on our behalf, or doing these things to mediate between us and God. For those familiar with only penal substitution and not with the broader theology of the Eastern fathers, such passages seem an obvious proof of the penal view. However, looked at in the broader context of Eastern patristic theology, such a reading becomes problematic.

If you dig in the Eastern fathers, you begin to see that the human condition is not primarily defined by guilt. Rather, our condition is that of a corrupt and dying species, and the work of Christ is ultimately aimed at healing and restoring our humanity, bringing us back to God. The mediation that Christ came into the world to enact is one of communicating the Life of God to us—what is called theosis, or deification: We, as icons of God, are made to partake of the divine nature, moving from mere biological life to eternal life, which is more than just longevity but an entirely different mode of being. This is the Life that is in the Father that Christ offers to us.

When talking about the work of Christ, the primary way the Eastern fathers see this is as a work of healing, Christ taking on our nature in order to restore it, correcting the relationship between the soul and the animal passions, and returning us to communion with God that we might partake of his Eternal Life. This is the Life of the Father that Christ has within himself and he offers to us—and which many refused, as Christ says in the Gospel of John.

Once you begin to see this healing as the primary work of Christ, then when you start to look at these passages about Christ’s suffering for our sake, or taking on our sins in a very different light.

What you see is exactly what I've talked about in other contexts: Christ enters our lowly, corrupt, and dying state—this being the sin he takes on himself. In taking on our Fallen nature, he heals and restores it. And he does so as a mediator, one who bears in his person the Life of God, which he communicates to our dying species.

Suddenly, phrases that appear to speak about penal substitution to those unfamiliar with the Eastern Church fathers look quite different. Looked at in the light of what they have to say about the wrath of God, or sin, or mediation, a different picture emerges. The language of wrath has nothing to do with God’s disposition toward the sinner—which is why Chrysostom will speak in the same breath about God’s wrath and his unbridled love that impelled the Incarnation. Instead, wrath concerns the effects of our retreat from God, which have brought death and dying upon us. But God’s disposition toward us is one of love, unrelentingly aimed at our redemption and providentially carrying us to our proper formation. Hence, he cannot abandon us to the corruption we have brought upon ourselves but sends his Son: Christ entering our lowly estate in order to heal what is broken in our species and raise us back to God, that we might partake of divine Life and become what we were created to be. Needless to say, such passages take on very different meanings in this light.

The point is not simply that the Eastern Church fathers afford a reading of such language that is different from penal substitution. Rather, I dare say that the theology of the Eastern fathers makes it impossible for them to advocate penal substitution.

When they talk about God's disposition toward individuals, they are emphatic that God is not a respecter of persons—a point taken from both Saints Peter and Paul. The Eastern fathers very much insist that what this means is that God does not have favorites. He doesn't show any sort of partiality or favoritism. When you look at Cyril of Alexandria's commentary on John, when talking about the idea that John is the disciple whom Jesus loved, Cyril insists that this sort of unique love for John must be because John is unique in virtue, because God does not show any sort of favoritism.

The reason this is important is because when you're talking about God's disposition toward someone, you cannot have God be negatively disposed toward Christ. It would be impossible that Christ—the most pleasing human being to ever exist—that God could ever be negatively disposed toward.

In this sense, wrath always has to be, if you're going to talk about taking on wrath, taking on our corrupt and dying disposition. It has to be a reference to the lowliest state where we've been bound by sin and corrupt and are in a state of death and dying, and what Christ is doing is entering into that, taking on the likeness of sinful flesh to heal it and restore it and walk it back to God.

This is what C.S. Lewis calls in Mere Christianity "God repenting on behalf of humanity within humanity"—walking us back to the Father and restoring us there to make us what we are made to be, the thing we've been crippled and cannot do for ourselves.

That condition in which we find ourselves, that condition of death and dying and corruption that results from us having turned away from God, is actually the thing that Christ steps into. You see this in Basil of Caesarea when he talks about "the wages of sin is death." The way Basil interprets that in his homilies on why God is not the cause of evil is that this doesn't have to do with some sort of judicial exactitude. It has to do with the fact that having turned away from the author of life, having turned away from the source of life, you naturally die. That's just the effect of it.

This is where the condition in which we find ourselves has nothing to do with God's disposition. The provident, loving, good God is always disposed toward our good. That's why he sent his son. That's why he continues to pursue us even now, and that's why he continues to pursue us even in the realm of the dead. God's disposition toward us is never anything but toward our good and out of love and a desire for our redemption.

Wrath refers to the state of death and dying in which we find ourselves, and that's the thing that Christ enters into.

Old Testament Sacrifices Reconsidered

Taking this to biblical text, I think in general the Old Testament passages about this, where people will try to find penal substitution, are severely misread, and there's a lot of anachronism in the ways judicial exactitude is projected backwards onto these.

The quintessential example is Leviticus 16, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. One thing that's often said about this is that on this day of atonement, the priest goes in and lays his hands on the head of the scapegoat, pronounces the sins of the people on the head of the scapegoat, then takes it and kills it and offers the blood before God, sprinkling it on the mercy seat. Beneath the mercy seat is where the Ten Commandments are, so when God looks down from the mercy seat, what he sees is the law and the blood that's been shed to satisfy the law. For that reason, his wrath is appeased because essentially somebody has died on behalf of these moral infractions, so Israel can go on and live another day until next year when they do this again.

That's wildly inaccurate. Anybody who carefully reads the text knows it's wildly inaccurate because you don't offer the scapegoat to God. You don't sprinkle the blood of the scapegoat on the altar.

The way you see this actually work out is you have these two potential sacrifices chosen by lots, so God picks his. One of those is the scapegoat, and this one, yes, the sins of the people are pronounced and laid on the head, and then it's led off into the wilderness and released to die. There even seems to be some connotation having to do with Azazel, a desert demon, so it's being released into the wilderness and into the hands of demonic powers.

Then you have the other one that is without spot and blemish, that is actually pleasing and pure, and that one is the one that is killed and its blood is offered on the altar.

Clearly, if you're going to want to do penal substitution, this is problematic, because people want to see the pronouncement of sins on the head of the one and the shedding of blood and things like that, because they want to have some sort of penal substitution where my sins, which are not your sins, are transferred over to you, and then you're killed, and then that blood is offered to God. But that's not actually what happens within this passage.

What you actually see enacted is the ways in which we are expelled from Eden, because that's what the Holy of Holies is—it is the presence of God, and we're expelled from that. We're reminded of that expulsion by the angels who are on the curtain that divides us from the Holy of Holies, and we can't go in there. This one is sent away into the wilderness as we were sent away into the wilderness under the dominion of demons and ultimately to die.

In many ways, the scapegoat is actually a reenactment or picture of our expulsion from Eden and ultimately the death and subjugation to demonic powers that we experience. What you see with the other one, which is offered to God, is that what is offered is something pleasing.

This is another thing in general about trying to project penal substitution onto the ancient Near East that's problematic: you don't blemish something and then offer it to a deity within the ancient Near East. Whenever you offer something, you offer your best. This is something God complains about—he chastises the people that you're giving me your sick and lame animals and doing that sort of thing. You shouldn't do that. You should give me your best, the things that are without spot and blemish.

Clearly here, we can look at spot and blemishes as some sort of representation or symbolism of Christ's purity and things like that. But the idea that that purity is somehow a purity that means he has no debts of his own, and therefore we can transfer debts onto him and therefore punish him as if he were us—that's simply not there in Leviticus.

You have instead a picture of our expulsion, and you have a picture of one who is pure and righteous being able to enter into God and offer his blood on our behalf in a way that's pleasing. You don't get penal substitution. What you have is that somehow, if we're going to take this as a picture of Christ and us, the picture of us is that we have exiled ourselves from God and put ourselves under the dominion of demons and in a state of death and dying. But Christ is able to approach God in a pleasing manner because he's without spot and blemish, and he approaches them specifically through martyrdom.

I don't think you can project any of this sort of transference of demerits or punishment for demerits onto any of these sorts of sacrifices that you find in the Old Testament.

Another thing I would add about these Old Testament passages is that the idea that consistently emerges is that the primary concern is for purity and for holiness. Rather than this being about punishment for certain infractions, the primary concern is actually the fact that we who are not clean, or we who are not holy, cannot approach the one who is holy because it's dangerous to us.

The picture, the goal of all this, is to purify us, to make us holy and make us a people that can approach and commune with and participate in God. This goes to a contrast where, with the Eastern fathers and the Eastern understanding of Christianity, the work of Christ is primarily about the healing and restoration of humanity, our purification, our restoration, bringing us into what we are made to be for the purpose of being able to approach God the way we are made to approach and commune with and participate in God.

The Old Testament images about sacrifice and holiness and all these sorts of things are much more conducive to the Eastern picture than they are to any sort of notion of penal substitution.

As for other biblical language—Isaiah 53 or New Testament language where it talks about Christ dying for our sins, or suffering on our behalf, or taking on the likeness of sinful flesh, or the punishment that brought us peace being upon him—when you start to look at those sorts of passages with these different lenses, the sort of lenses you get from the Eastern fathers, where sin doesn't necessarily mean moral infraction but means corruption, death, dying; where wrath doesn't mean that God's negatively disposed toward us but refers to the effect upon us as a result of retreating from God; when you look at the language of mediation and see that it's not one standing between two offended parties trying to make peace between them but has to do with reuniting us with God, rebuilding the bridge back to eternal life, to commune with God in the way we are originally meant to—when you look at it in that sort of way, and also recognize that Christ is doing this on our behalf because our humanity is crippled, and even though we continue to bear the image of God and continue to be receptive and have the innate nature required to commune with God, having subjugated our higher nature to our lower nature, subjugated our spirit to our fleshly passions, we're incapable of restoring this union with God and bringing ourselves back to life—Christ is doing this on our behalf.

All of a sudden, the idea that Christ is taking on the likeness of sinful flesh, the idea that Christ is doing this for the specific purpose of bringing the life of God back to us and us back to God, the idea that Christ is doing this and this is hard and this is suffering and this is painful, and he's doing this to heal us and restore us for our sake rather than for his own, that he's doing this to bring us back from a condition of being subjugated to the demonic powers and subjugated to death and dying, and to liberate us from that condition and raise us up and elevate us and bring us back to God—when you start to look at it in that sort of way and shift your perspective on these terms and on the narrative, all of a sudden these passages continue to make sense.

They actually do make sense in the light of that narrative, and you don't actually need penal substitution to make sense of them. You can look at a statement like "Jesus suffered for my sins" or "died for my sins" and start to see that you don't actually need penal substitution to make sense of that phrase. That phrase does not, in itself, mean sins necessarily mean moral infraction, suffering or dying on my behalf doesn't necessarily mean that God is angry with me and needs to pour out that anger in some sort of judicial punishment, and Jesus steps in to be punished, taking capital punishment on my behalf.

Instead, it's perfectly intelligible to talk about sin as the state of corruption and death and dying, and Christ entering into my lowliest state, the lowly estate of humanity, and healing us and restoring us, which involves a great deal of suffering and ultimately martyrdom and death, that he does that on our behalf to restore us and reconcile us to God—not in the sense that God is negatively disposed toward us, but rather in the sense of bridging the divide between us and God that cut us off from eternal life in the first place.

You start to see that yes, of course, these passages can mean that. You start to see that penal substitution is actually something that's projected on those passages because of certain baggage that we have in terms of how we read words like sin and words like wrath and words like mediator, but those meanings are not necessarily there in those terms.

Before moving on from this entire notion of lenses and how to approach these passages, let me say one more thing about sometimes people noting certain types of analogies that are used that appear to be transactional, something having to do with debt or a payment of a certain debt.

I know that a lot of people in the Christian East have a clear aversion to that, partially because they recognize that's really the most conducive way to talk about penal substitution. When you're talking about the history of the Latin West and merits and demerits and transferred merits, really, at the end of the day, it is a very transactional way of thinking about sin and positive merits and negative demerits. It very much is a certain accounting: I do moral infractions, I have a negative balance. Someone like Christ or the saints produces positive meritorious deeds, they have a positive balance. This transference is like transferring a negative balance over to so-and-so and a positive balance over to me.

Obviously, accounting metaphors end up being really desirable in the West because they're the most conducive way to talk about penal substitution. I think for that reason, sometimes people in the Christian East have just an allergy to any sort of language about debts and that sort of metaphor because it reeks of penal substitution.

I don't love that as my favorite metaphor when talking about the work of Christ, but I don't think there's anything inherently problematic about saying I have some sort of unpayable debt and Christ pays the debt. I think you could say that sort of thing. You could use that kind of metaphor for what Christ does.

There is a real sense in which we've been crippled and find ourselves in a condition we cannot ourselves remedy, and Christ steps in and remedies that on our behalf, even though he has no innate obligation to do so—it's not his debt, it's ours. I think you can use that sort of analogy just fine if the analogy is meant to say that Christ isn't the one beholden to death and dying and corruption. He's not the one who is crippled and has cut himself off from God, and he's going to step in on our behalf and rescue us from what we've brought on ourselves.

Analogies have limitations, so I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with using such an analogy, even if you're opposed to penal substitution. But I would just say that I think there is a tendency, perhaps an error on both sides, to presume that if you can find any sort of debt metaphor or transactional metaphor in the biblical text, this somehow indicates something like penal substitution. I'm not sure that that metaphor in itself requires penal substitution, if the analogy is just meant to be that we've put ourselves in a predicament we can't get ourselves out of, and Christ steps in to get us out of it.

Early Christian Martyrdom and Conformity to Christ

There were a couple of other things I wanted to touch on, and one has to do with the way this picture of the atonement of Christ—the Eastern patristic view—begins to influence a lot of the thinking about the Christian life among the early Christians.

I talked about the Eastern patristic understanding of the atonement in the context of this broader understanding of anthropology and the Christian narrative. The Eastern Church Fathers, when they look at Genesis, see man as a microcosm, this merger of the higher and lower things of creation—the immortal things and the mortal things.

If you look at Genesis, the earth is the realm of mortals—things that return to the earth, things that die, they're taken from the earth. Death is the return to the earth. Yet you don't have any sort of return of that kind when talking about the heavens. So you have this mortal and immortal contrast happening in Genesis.

With man, he's taken from the dust of earth, he's breathed into from heaven, he becomes a living spirit. Spirit here is language used specifically for intelligent or rational spirits, the immortals, like the angels. So you get this hybrid—the notion that man is a microcosm talked about in the Eastern Church Fathers, this merger of the heavens and earth in this singular composite.

Or, if you prefer, what Uncle Screwtape calls "that disgusting hybrid." This hybrid, this merger of the mortal and the immortal, raised for ancient peoples the question of whether man was created mortal or immortal. What do you get when you merge these two things?

The answer you get as early as Philo of Alexandria, and then echoing in people like Theophilus of Antioch and onward in the Eastern fathers, is that man was created potentially mortal and potentially immortal, his will essentially being this self-determining faculty. Unlike other creatures that simply do what they are made to do, man has this unique capacity to have a clear understanding, to discern what he ought to become and what he ought to do, and to choose whether to do it or not.

So man faced the choice whether to live and die like beasts, or whether to partake of God and commune with God and commune with the eternal life of God, and thereby raise up his lower nature. Of course, man is made to commune with God as an image of God, an image bearer. We are made to commune with God and be conformed to his likeness and raise up the lower nature. But that's not what Adam chooses.

This is the nature of the fall and of corruption—we find ourselves in an unnatural state where, as St. Paul describes it, the spirit (this higher rational nature, this image-bearing part of us) has a memory of what it's supposed to be, a longing to commune with God, a longing to be more than it is and to have more than just biological life, but it's buried and subjugated beneath these animal passions, being tyrannically ruled over by these animal impulses. For that reason, it ends up crippled.

Even though it's made to commune with God and turn to God and be virtuous, and ultimately commune and partake of divine life and attain eternal life, it's incapable of doing so. This is the struggle that Saint Paul describes in the seventh chapter of his letter to the Romans.

In terms of the redemption narrative and the Gospel itself, the incarnation and the life of Christ is understood to be the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, who has the life of God in himself, joining himself with our nature, taking on our fallen nature. In taking that on, he heals it, and he begins to restore it back to its original state of incorruption, and then go beyond that state of incorruption to commune with God and raise it up toward God, to partake of immortality and incorruption, and ultimately the resurrection from the dead, in order to become—in order to make humanity what humanity was originally created to become in the first place.

I talked about the fact that Adam is not what we were made to become. Adam was sinless, sure—he didn't have any sins—but he was made to become something more, and he never did. Obviously he was susceptible to corruption, because he corrupted himself, whereas we are made to become immortal, incorruptible, and you don't see that in humanity until the resurrected Christ.

I talked specifically about the various ways in which the crucifixion factors into this—the defeat of the demonic powers, the clearing of the air, opening the way back up to God. But one of the aspects I talked about was the reordering of human nature and the defeat of the passions, specifically when I was talking about Maximus the Confessor.

When we talk about the animal passions—and if you're unfamiliar with this term, this is the sort of thing St. Paul and St. James talk about as the root of sin—the animal passions are basically pre-volitional impulses, responses to external stimuli. You as an animal, when you encounter something that seems good to you, you smell food that smells delicious, you have a natural desire and inclination toward it. Whereas if you encounter something that seems dangerous and a threat to your life, you have a natural animal inclination to recoil from it, to run away from it, out of an interest in preserving your own life.

The animal passions have to do with these reflexive, pre-volitional responses to perceived goods and perceived evils. These are the tyrannical throes of the flesh that we are bound by.

What Maximus recognizes is that Christ, in becoming incarnate, takes on the blameless passions. This is one reason he can experience things like temptation. It's one reason he can experience things like grief as he's moving closer to his martyrdom. This is one reason why in Gethsemane, there is the sweating of blood and things like that. It's because Christ has taken on our humanity and with that, taken on our blameless passions—blameless being that there's no volitional cooperation in these things, they're pre-volitional, so they don't have negative moral connotations, but they are perfectly natural that your animal nature wants things it perceives as good and recoils from things it perceives as a threat.

What Maximus sees is the crucifixion of Christ as ultimately a definitive act of defeating the passions. Why? Because every one of the passions cries out, "Give this to me, or I die," or "Take this from me, or I die." For that reason, to submit to the will of God, even unto death, is the definitive defeat of the passions, because the thing that drives the passions is a fear of death. So to embrace it and to embrace it willfully at the will of God is the definitive act by which the passions are defeated and the will has clung to God, never again to be carried away by the throes of the passions.

This is one of the things Maximus sees in the crucifixion of Christ. This actually goes to something I hadn't mentioned before that's rather interesting: you actually have two definitive acts that stand in contrast. St. Paul is the first one to point this out in Romans 5, where he talks about one act of Adam and one act of Christ. What he talks about is the act of Adam being the one by which the many are made sinners, meaning the many are dragged into corruption and death and dying and distorted relationship between your spirit and flesh. And then with Christ, the many are made alive.

What is the one act of righteousness? That one act of righteousness is obedience to God, even unto death on a cross. This is the thing that is supremely pleasing to God. This is, if we were to interpret the thing in Leviticus, that purity, that thing that is pleasing to God, that is offered up to God, is the blood of Christ. It's the blood of Christ not in the sense that God's looking down at the law and needs to be satisfied that somehow he no longer needs to find somebody to kill, but rather, what is pleasing is that martyrdom, that martyrdom that says, "I will obey you even unto death."

That is the definitive act of righteousness. There is no place to go past once you get there. That is the definitive act of righteousness, and that's the thing that Christ does. That's why it's supremely pleasing to God that Christ does this. But it's also the thing that definitively defeats the passions and confirms humanity in righteousness. Of course, both acts involve a tree.

The reason I wanted to zero in on this particular aspect is because it illuminates why martyrdom was such a point of interest and zeal in the early church. I think a lot of people are aware that there was a lot of martyrdom in early Christianity, and they're even aware that Christians seem to be very willing to be martyred, and they admire that sort of thing. But I think what's less clear to a lot of people is why. Why was martyrdom of such great interest?

I think it's precisely because of this understanding of what the cross is accomplishing that there was a recognition that what Christianity is is conformity to the image of Christ in the hope of attaining to the resurrection of the dead.

What was recognized is that, yes, Christ heals humanity, he restores humanity, he attains to the resurrection of the dead, and by bridging that way back to God, he offers to us his life-giving flesh and blood in communion. He also offers to us union with him through baptism, the gift of the Holy Spirit, by which we can commune with the divine nature, and that bridge back to God has been rebuilt, and he is able to mediate life to us.

That's true, but with that, there was a recognition that our participation in that is critical, not as a way of earning favor before God, but as a participation in the healing and restoration process. In other words, Christ has done this to heal and restore our species. In order for us to be healed, we need to turn away from death and turn back toward life.

So the entire Christian life was looked at from this perspective of restoration and healing. How? First of all, obviously, by entering into the hospital—the church—where you receive union with Christ, that bridge back to God is rebuilt, and being united with him, you can partake of the divine nature. It's also that you don't just receive this medicine of immortality, but you are supposed to be conformed to him.

This is where the entire life of the Christian involves repenting. I mentioned that C.S. Lewis talks about, in Mere Christianity, the Son of God repenting on behalf of humanity, in humanity. That's one of the things he said, which, like so many things in Lewis, echoes aspects of Eastern patristic theology.

This is where our conformity to Christ involves a repentance as well. If this is the pathway back to God, and that's what we've seen in Christ—what we've seen in Christ is the picture of the pathway back from corruption to health and healing to ultimately the resurrection from the dead and incorruption and immortality—then we too have to enter onto that road.

Yes, we cannot—we are not the Son of God, so we don't have the life of God within ourselves—but by being united with him, we enter into that mediation, that restored bridge, where we can partake of the divine nature. But also with that, we have to also engage in the imitation of that repentance.

That's one reason why, entering into the church, we engage in repentance. It's one reason why when we sin, we turn back to God in repentance, in things like confession. It's one reason why we engage in things like fasting in order to resist the passions and put them back in their proper place. It's one reason why the soul is raised up to God through things like prayer and worship in order to commune with God.

All of the Christian life is aimed at this imitation of Christ for the purpose of following that pattern by which we, as St. Paul says, might hope to attain to the resurrection of the dead.

One of the things with this, though, is you can begin to see how, if the early Christians are understanding the work of Christ in the way I've described, why there was such an interest in martyrdom, because martyrdom, for them, becomes the definitive act by which one is conformed to the image of Christ.

If I too can embrace God and the will of God and the love of God from a place of willfully saying no to the passions and embracing death, then I too am taking this final step with Christ into life and the resurrection from the dead, just as he did. It's the full conformity to the image of Christ and the participation in that work that he did.

This is something you see in Ignatius of Antioch. Ignatius of Antioch—if you haven't read him, you should—in one of his letters, where he's being led off to be fed to lions, he is writing to his flock. One of the things he beckons them to do is he says, "Do not suffer me to die." This is where his language gets very inverted: "But let me live."

Of course, in the context of this letter, what he's talking about is he's trying to bid them don't try to intervene on my behalf. Don't try to rescue me from this martyrdom and thereby have me die. In other words, what he sees is he sees his death, his impending martyrdom, as the pathway to life for him.

He talks about this idea that when he is conformed to the sufferings of God, when he emerges on the other side of it, meaning from the sleep of death, he will be fully human. What that means is that Ignatius is aware of the very fact I've talked about, which is that Adam is not fully human. He is man, yes, but he is made in the image of God—he has not attained the likeness.

We don't see the likeness of God, the image and likeness of God, until we see the resurrected Christ, and the pathway to get there is martyrdom. So Ignatius is eager—he's zealous to be made food for lions, because he wants to emerge on the other side, fully human, having been conformed to the image of Christ, and attain to the resurrection from the dead, becoming fully human, the thing that he is made to be.

So Ignatius pleads with his readers to not intervene and not prevent his martyrdom. He is zealous to complete this life of martyrdom and this conformity to the image of Christ, because he believes that life waits for him on the other side.

We also see something very similar in an anonymous work preserved by Eusebius of Caesarea that talks about the fact that the church was oftentimes seen—Mary was talked about like a metaphor for the church, because just as in the womb of Mary, Christ gestated, so in the womb of the church, little Christs are gestated.

What's particularly interesting about this, when we look at this in context, is that we see a couple of different metaphors that were consistent in the early church. One was that the day of martyrdom was actually referred to as the birthday of the martyrs. Why? It's the same notion you find in Ignatius, where the idea is that they have made it to the other side.

All of us are little Christs engaged in this daily imitation, these little martyrdoms—these little martyrdoms of saying no to the passions, of giving alms to the poor, of pouring ourselves out for the world. That's what we're supposed to be engaged in as little Christs who are engaged in these small imitations. But the martyrs have made that final step of a full conformity to the martyrdom of Christ, and they have been birthed. They've come out of the womb alive. That is why they refer to it as their birthday.

Yet you also find another metaphor: the apostates are referred to as stillborns. Why? Because they've been conceived, they've started to grow, and then they've left the womb before ever becoming fully alive. So they're stillborns—they leave the womb dead.

I wanted to point that out because I think this provides important context for understanding early Christian spirituality. Because they see the incarnation and the life of Christ and the work of Christ in this way, they also tend to see the Christian life as one in which we too are supposed to engage in this imitation.

This imitation, on the one hand, yes, it is simply good that we do these sorts of things, but this imitation is also for the sake of life. Just as Christ rebuilt the bridge between man and God and began to reorient the passions to their proper place and turn the soul back toward God and ultimately defeated the passions, embracing the will of God, even unto death, so we too are to do the same.

We enter into this communion with the life of God through the sacraments. We practice saying no to the passions, through resisting temptation and through fasting and things like that. We lift the soul back to God through prayer and through worship, and ultimately, we're also supposed to be engaged in all of these sort of little martyrdoms, saying no to the flesh, putting to death the flesh, St. Paul talks about every single day. But with the hope—or at least, many of the early Christians had the hope—that they would ultimately be conformed to the image of Christ through actual martyrdom.

Now, of course, that's not requisite in order to attain eternal life or to be saved, but nonetheless, you can understand why the sentiment would be there if what they see in the Christian life is a life that is meant to be conformed to the image of Christ, because this is the pattern of how salvation, how life is attained—why they would not only embrace the small martyrdoms day to day, but would be eager to participate in the bigger martyrdom that might come at the end of their life and usher them into life eternal and the resurrection from the dead, ultimately.