What Is Penal Substitution? A Just & Justifying Atonement

Commenting on Romans 8:3–4, New Testament scholar N. T. Wright judges,

No clearer statement is found in Paul, or indeed anywhere else in all early Christian literature, of the early Christian belief that what happened on the cross was the judicial punishment of sin. Taken in conjunction with 8:1 and the whole argument of the passage, not to mention the partial parallels in 2 Cor 5:21 and Gal 3:13, it is clear that Paul intends to say that in Jesus’ death the condemnation that sin deserved was meted out fully and finally, so that sinners over whose heads that condemnation had hung might be liberated from this threat once and for all.¹

Here we find a crisp summary of the doctrine of Christ’s penal substitutionary atonement (PSA): Christ bore the penal sentence for our guilt as our substitute.

Importantly, penal substitution is not to be understood as the only aspect of Christ’s work, just as guilt is not the only aspect of our human plight. PSA does not exhaust the meaning of Christ’s work. Jesus came to destroy death, the devil, sin, and human corruption; to give life to the dead, to judge the world in righteousness, and to establish his everlasting kingdom of righteousness and peace. Yet, according to penal substitution, none of these other important facets of Christ’s work—victory over the powers, triumph over death, moral influence, and a demonstration of God’s just government of the world—are possible unless he takes our place of judgment.

In this article, we’ll suggest some ways the Bible testifies to, supports, and clarifies the doctrine of penal substitution.

The eternal covenant of redemption

The original basis for Christ’s mediatorial role lies in eternity.

The fall was not a surprise. All along, God has predestined the incarnation of his Son to redeem his people as the climax of his purpose in creation. The Father chose a bride for his Son. He predestined these people his co-heirs (Eph 1:4–11). As the mediator between God and his people, the Son knew from all eternity that he would become incarnate and endure the cross. In this sense, Jesus was “foreknown before the foundation of the world” (1 Pet 1:20–21).

This eternal covenant is the basis for the indefatigable mercy of the Lover for his beloved. The Son, equally God with the Father, so loved his bride despite the adulteries she would commit (see the book of Hosea), that he was willing to give his life for her. As a result, we become beneficiaries of Christ’s work in a covenant of grace, united through faith to Christ as our mediatorial head.

The Gospels’ reflect Jesus’s own sense of this eternal mission. He refers to those the Father had given him before the world existed, saving them as the “charge I have received from my Father” (John 10:18; see also John 6:39; 10:14–15, 17–18, 27–29; 17:5–10). Likewise, in the ancient world, especially in Israel, naming was pregnant with deeper significance (all the way back to Adam naming the animals). So, given the great candidates in biblical history, what name would the Father decree for his incarnate Son? Jeshua, which means “Yahweh Saves.” Mary will bear the Son of God, the angel tells Joseph, “and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matt 1:21; emphasis added).

Scholarly criticisms of PSA often caricature it as “divine child abuse.”² However, far from being a passive, unwilling victim of divine or human violence, the Son was an equal party to a covenant with the Father and the Spirit before creation. The Son gave himself. It is his own life to lay down and take up again of his own free will (John 10:18). He willingly sacrificed himself (John 10:11, 18; cf. Matt 16:23; Luke 9:51; John 4:34; Heb 10:5–10) “for the joy set before him” (Heb 12:2), knowing that his suffering would lead to glory not only for him, but for his people. Yes, Jesus sees it as an agonizing struggle (Luke 12:50; Mark 10:38). Yet in spite of his grief, he determines, “Shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given me?” (John 18:11; cf. John 12:27). His obedience undoes Adam’s disobedience (Rom 5:12–21; Heb 5:7–10).

Additionally, God did not begin to love us at the cross. It is not as if God hated us and then loved us at Golgotha by hating Jesus instead. It is God’s love that moves him to provide his own satisfaction of justice. The God who judges is the God who saves because the Father “so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16). The God who commands and condemns is the same God who, as our human representative, obeys and bears our condemnation.

All three persons of the Trinity are involved in this sacrifice:

• The Father gives his only Son.
• The Son willingly lays down his life.
• The Spirit sustains the Son in his grief and vindicates him in his resurrection.

Thus, as John Stott warned, “Any notion of penal substitution in which three independent actors play a role—the guilty party, the punitive judge, and the innocent victim—is to be repudiated with the utmost vehemence.”³ The picture of a wrathful Father and a loving Son verges closely to the Marcionite heresy. Moreover, it tends to assume that the Son is ontologically inferior to the Father. The righteousness, holiness, and justice that provoke the Father’s wrath against sin are as inherent in the Son as in the Father.

Such clarifications are underscored by the eternal covenant of redemption between the persons of the Godhead.

God’s righteousness and the human predicament

God created human nature good in both body and soul, but Adam chose of his own free will to reject God’s will and the goodness of this nature in order to determine his own nature (see WCF, Belgic, HC). God’s lavish provision, command of love, and his raising them to the rank of viceroys was not sufficient. Like God’s adversary, they wanted to be gods themselves, determining good and evil and their own destinies by what they saw and felt instead of by what God said in his word. The guilt and corruption spread from Adam to Eve as they blamed each other, and to their children, leading to the first murder.

As we continue in Scripture, we see that Israel did not fulfill its commission and so was exiled from the temporal and typological garden of God. Nor was there anything that the covenant people could do to reconcile themselves to God (Jer 30:12–13). Even for gentiles, there is a natural law that all people know by nature. It is the Ten Commandments written on the conscience of all human beings. We are morally corrupt, unable and unwilling to fulfill the law (Deut 27:26; Rom 3:20; Gal 3:10; Jas 2:10). Thus, everyone—Jew and gentile—is “under sin” (3:9).

Yet the horizontal effects of sin against each other, individually and socially, are grounded in the vertical nature of sin as an offense against God, a disruption of his moral order. As David’s confession in Psalm 51 attests, what makes sin against others more detestable is that they are ultimately crimes against God himself. It is this vertical dimension that raises our offenses against each other to sins—penal crimes that deserve God’s judgment.

God’s judgment is called a “curse” in Scripture. Far from pictures of witches, curses in the Hebrew Scriptures are political sanctions for violating treaties. Every treaty or covenant had stipulations (do’s and dont’s) attended by sanctions (what will happen if you obey or disobey). This is the form of the covenant God made with Adam (Gen 2:16–17). We find the same curse formula in the covenant that Israel swore at Mount Sinai (Exod 24:7–8). This act confirmed the people’s burden to fulfill the covenant, and the blood if they violate it is on their heads.

The sanctions of the covenant in Deuteronomy 28 highlight the seriousness of their oath. If they disobey, God will do to them what he did to the idolaters in the land. The people and the land are holy because God is holy and has chosen to make his dwelling among them. However, if they reject God as king, he will reject them as his people and eject them from his land, as he cast Adam and Eve out of Eden. The judgments upon Israel and Judah, including the exile itself, are testimonies to the fact that God does not, cannot, go back on his covenant. He is faithful to execute the sentence because he is God.

The God of eternal and infinite love is also the God of justice and righteousness. God does not issue certain commands because he decided they would be useful. They are expressions of his intrinsic nature. His law is not arbitrary. Not even God can choose to overlook faults unless there is some way of reconciling mercy with justice. God cannot ignore sin. He does not set aside his righteous will. His law must be fulfilled, his just anger satisfied (i.e., propitiated).⁴

God’s simplicity resists our temptation to identify a single attribute, including love, as more definitive of God than others. God cannot exercise love and mercy at the expense of his righteousness and justice.

That said, PSA does not teach that God is inherently wrathful. Rather, love is essential to God’s being, as are other attributes such as justice, righteousness, and holiness. God does not choose between love and justice: These attributes are perfectly united in the simplicity of his being. God’s simplicity resists our temptation to identify a single attribute, including love, as more definitive of God than others. God cannot exercise love and mercy at the expense of his righteousness and justice. Nor is God “bloodthirsty,” like the violent deities of ancient paganism. Rather, he is righteous. God’s anger is aroused by the violation of his moral character and will, precisely because he loves his own goodness and the goodness of the world he created. His judgment is never unloving and his love never violates his righteousness.

In contrast, critiques of penal substitutionary atonement often rest on different views of God and human nature after the fall. The theme of God’s wrath against sinners is regarded as a form of violence.⁵ For some, God’s love eclipses all other attributes, so that he can simply decree to set aside his just demands. Propitiation, reconciliation, and justification are solutions to problems not believed to exist in the first place.⁶ To this Anselm responds, “You have not yet considered the greatness of your sin.”⁷

According to some, rather than seeing Christ’s work as bearing a sentence that we deserved, we should understand it as moral empowerment for our good works. In other words, the effect of Christ’s work is not objective reconciliation with God, but its subjective influence on us, the sinner’s repentance.⁸

According to exemplarist views, Christ’s death on the cross demonstrates God’s love in such a powerful way that only the coldest hearts could resist its lure and remain enemies of God. Now, of course, Christ’s death does disclose God’s love, but its purpose is to save those whom he loves. Actually, it seems closer to “divine child abuse” to suggest that Christ’s passion was simply an object lesson. And unless it actually accomplished reconciliation, how could the crucifixion be a sign of God’s love? Further, if Jesus saved primarily by his example, he need not be the incarnate God.

The hidden premise of these models is a semi-Pelagian or Pelagian anthropology that rejects the imputation of Adam’s guilt and corruption to the whole human race, and therefore the moral inability of sinners to satisfy God’s law. Subjective views assume to some extent that human beings are in the same position as Adam: able freely to choose whether they will accept God’s terms. The main instinct is rehabilitation. However, PSA assumes with Scripture that we are “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph 2:1) and that Christ died for us while we were still sinners (Rom 5:10).

Observe that it is against the backdrop of God’s wrath against sin (Rom 1:18–3:20) that the Apostle Paul explains the good news (Rom 3:21–26). In other words, how we understand the nature of Christ’s work cannot be separated from the plight that such redemption addresses. From the first Adam, we inherit a condition of guilt leading to death (Rom 5:14–19). Notice the logical order: This universal death sentence is based on guilt and corruption inherited from Adam. The apostle repeats this order in 1 Corinthians 15:56–57: The problem of death is solved by removing its punishment as a sentence for sin, backed up by the law. As the covenantal head, Adam bore the responsibility of obedience or disobedience on behalf of the whole human race. Only when the problem of guilt is resolved are sinners liberated from the death sentence.

The Old Testament sacrificial system

Blood atonement lies at the heart of both the wonder and the offense of the Christian proclamation (see Heb 9:22). The concept of propitiation, satisfying God through offerings, is intrinsic to the New and Old Testaments. Thus, any successful atonement doctrine must explain how the cross is the fulfillment of the typological sacrificial system.

We have no explicit mention of any sacrifices offered by Adam and Eve, but it would have been consistent with the covenantal economy if they had brought the thank offering. Obviously, there could not have been a guilt offering prior to the fall. But there is no question that after the fall, a guilt offering is required. God did this by replacing the loincloths covering Adam and Eve with the skins of an animal.

So Abel brought a proper guilt offering from “the firstborn of his flock” (Gen 4:4), but Cain, “a worker of the ground,” brought a portion of his produce (the thank offering). The judicial language is unmistakable: The one who offers the proper sacrifice will be “accepted.” God “had regard for Abel and his offering”—by which Abel acknowledged his guilt and God’s provision of a substitute—but “for Cain and his offering he had no regard.” “So Cain was very angry, and his face fell” (Gen 4:4–5; emphasis added). It is not an overstatement to suggest that the first religious war is provoked by Cain’s denial of the need for a substitutionary sacrifice for his sin and by his jealousy toward Abel for having been justified (“accepted,” “regarded”) by God’s grace.⁹

The clearly expiatory nature of the sacrifices in Israel is seen in Leviticus 1:4; 4:29–35; 5:10; 17:11, including transfer of guilt (Lev 1:4; 16:21–22). The burnt offering—singled out for atonement—was to be either from the flock or the herd, but in either case “a male without blemish” (Lev 1:3). Guilt would be transferred from the worshiper to the sacrifice by a laying on of hands, “and it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him” (v. 4). Further, on the Day of Atonement the priest would sprinkle the blood of the sin offering on the altar and mercy seat, which contained the treaty-tablets in the ark of the covenant. “Thus the priest shall make atonement for him, and he shall be forgiven” (Lev 4:30–31; cf. 16:21–27). Even the Exodus was preceded by the Passover in which the avenging angel took a strict account of those who through faith applied the blood to their doorposts.

This need for atonement is not owing to some abstract principle, much less the arbitrary command of a bloodthirsty deity. Rather, it belongs to the covenantal context of God’s law. God’s wrath is an expression of his righteous judgment, and blood is a synecdoche for the whole life of the person that God requires. “The life is in the blood” (Lev 17:11). To be drained of blood is to be unalive.

Likewise, the New Testament sees these Old Testament sacrifices as prefiguring Christ’s work, as shadow is related to the substance or type to antitype (Col 2:17; Heb 9:23–24; 10:1; 13:11–12; 2 Cor 5:21; 1 John 1:7). The New Testament proclaims Jesus as sinless (2 Cor 5:21; 1 Pet 2:21–25; 3:18; 1 John 3:5, 7), the sacrificial Lamb (1 Pet 1:19; Rev 5:6–14; 12:11; 14:1–5; 19:6–10; 21:9–14; 22:1–5). Christians see Jesus as “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), the scapegoat caught in the thicket, “our Passover” (1 Cor 5:7). Christ “loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Eph 5:2). The Old Testament saints trusted in Christ through the types and shadows of the sacrificial system. He is the fulfillment of the entire Levitical system, as both high priest and sacrifice.

Throughout the Gospels and Epistles, we discover references to redemption through the blood of Christ (Matt 26:27–28; cf. Acts 20:28; 1 Cor 11:25; 1 Pet 1:2, 19). The passage, “When you make his life an offering for sin,” in Isaiah 53:10, “by the first century was certainly taken to refer to a sacrifice.”¹⁰ As the only atoning sacrifice that truly avails in the heavenly courtroom, it is not only sufficient but final (Heb 10:18).¹¹ It is successful because of the superiority of the one who offers and is offered (Heb 1:1–2:18; 3:1–6; 4:14–5:10). While Christ’s sacrifice provides an example of self-giving love, it is a unique and unrepeatable event, bringing to an end all scapegoats, all bloody sacrifices, all substitutions, and all attempts to reconcile ourselves to God by our own efforts.

The transfer of guilt from the sinner to the scapegoat or lamb finds its antitype in the Gospels’ witness to Christ. The whole human race deserve God’s condemnation (Rom 1:18–3:20). The keeping of the law is not a possible entrance to everlasting joy. Instead, Paul speaks of Christ, “whom God put forward as a propitiation [ἱλαστήριον] by his blood, to be received by faith” (Rom 3:25; see also 1 John 2:2; 4:10). In Israel, the ἱλαστήριον was the mercy seat in the Holy of Holies, where blood was applied for the sins of the people. Likewise, the writer to the Hebrews emphasized that Jesus is the ἱλαστήριον, the mercy seat purified by blood (Heb 9:5). Although we are by nature God’s enemies, Christ’s death secured peace with God (Rom 5:1, 6–10). Together with the resurrection, of first importance in the gospel is “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3; emphasis added).

Use Logos to conduct a word study of ἱλαστήριον, often translated “propitiation” or “mercy seat.” Start your free trial.

The New Testament attributes Jesus’s appointment as high priest to a higher and older order already prophesied in the Old Testament: the Melchizedek priesthood, after the priest-king whom Abram recognized as his Lord, and heir of the eternal Davidic throne (Heb 5–7; cf. Gen 14:18–20; Ps 110:4). The writer contrasts the Melchizedek priesthood and the Levitical priesthood. The one is an unchangeable oath sworn by God (Heb 7:20–21), while the other depends on the obedience and mediation of sinful human beings (Heb 7:23–28).

Therefore, the “former commandment is set aside because of its weakness and uselessness (for the law made nothing perfect)” (Heb 7:18–19), while Jesus is “the guarantor of a better covenant” (Heb 7:22). In other words, change in priesthood requires a change in covenant, from a conditional law-covenant based on the types and shadows of the Levitical priesthood, to the eternal mediation of Jesus Christ in the covenant of redemption, realized in the covenant of grace.¹² Like the new covenant itself, this priesthood is tied to the Abrahamic covenant and not specifically to the conditional and temporary shadows of the law (see Gal 3–4). Christ’s priesthood has accomplished what the Levitical office could never do, and so has annulled it altogether. The old covenant is “obsolete,” he says (Heb 8:6–7, 13).

In the series of actions that Jesus performs on the Temple Mount that will lead to his crucifixion, he assumes the role of the temple itself: forgiving sins directly, bypassing the temple, to the outrage of the religious leaders.¹³ He proclaims himself the true temple, curses the fig tree, and predicts the destruction of the temple (chaps. 24–25). The priesthood and sacrifice of Jesus ended the usefulness of the sacred temple, which was destroyed in AD 70.

The substitutionary nature of Jesus’s mission

Christ’s substitutionary death was at the heart of his self-identity and consciousness. Jesus is the “Son of Man” who came “to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matt 20:28; also Mark 10:45). He is the Good Shepherd (Ezek 34) who voluntarily “lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). This vicarious mediation is so nuclear to Jesus’s self-consciousness that it lies at the heart of his intercession as he is about to go to his cross (John 17:1–5). Just as Moses lifted the bronze serpent in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted on a cross—and as all who looked to that brass serpent were healed from venomous bites, so all who look to Jesus Christ are saved (John 3:14–15).

In instituting the Last Supper, Jesus gives central place to his role as the substitutionary sacrifice who will save his people by his blood (Luke 22:19–20; cf. 1 Cor 11:25). He gives his flesh for the life of the world (John 6:51). But this promise of a new covenant that will “not [be] like the covenant that I made with their fathers” at Sinai. It will be dependent on his performance rather than theirs, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jer 31:31–34). The people of Israel sealed their oath with blood sprinkled on their own heads. However, Jesus seals his last will and testament with his own blood: “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt 26:28). In the upper room, Jesus in effect splashes the blood upon himself, bearing the curse that lies upon his people, drinking the cup of wrath so that they may drink the cup of salvation.

The abundant use of the prepositions ἀντί and ὑπέρ (“in place of”) across the New Testament underscores the substitutionary character of Christ’s death: Christ in the place of sinners; the guiltless for the guilty; the righteous for the unrighteous. In 2 Corinthians 5:21, a penal aspect is evident in Paul’s phrase “made sin” (ἁμαρτίαν ἐποίησεν), and its substitutionary aspect in the words “for us” (ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν). In his death, Jesus was made a “curse for us” (Gal 3:13) and was “offered once to bear the sins of many” (Heb 9:28). Likewise, Peter adds his testimony to the expiatory nature of Christ’s death: Jesus “suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous” (1 Pet 3:18), suffered “for you” (2:21); “bore … sins in his body on the tree” (2:24).

Jesus “laid down his life for us” (1 John 3:16), was delivered for us (Rom 8:32; Eph 5:2), died for us (Rom 5:8), for our sins (1 Cor 15:3), as “a ransom for all” (1 Tim 2:6), and delivered himself up for the church (Eph 5:25). The goal of the substitution is that “in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21) and be brought to God (1 Pet 3:18). He carried away our sins into the wilderness, suffering “outside the gate” (Heb 13:11–13) as the covenant-breaker, cursed by God (Gal 3:13).

New Testament atonement imagery

The various New Testament atonement motifs support and elucidate the notion of penal substitution.

Ransom/redemption

To the sacrificial imagery is added the economic analogy: We were slaves whom God bought back (redeem/ransom: ἀγοράζω, ἐξαγοράζω, λυτρόω; redemption: ἀπολύτρωσις, ἀντίλυτρον) in order to liberate us and reconcile us to himself. Such terms occur in the context of redemption from sin: its curse and tyranny. The price is paid in the marketplace (Matt 20:28; Mark 10:45; Rom 3:24; Eph 1:7; Col 1:13–14; Titus 2:14; Heb 9:12; 1 Pet 1:18–19). Because this price is paid to God’s justice, it frees us from the evil powers that hold us in bondage—especially Satan. However, the price is paid to God’s justice rather than to Satan.¹⁴ Christ is the redeemer who buys back his people by paying their debt at the highest personal price (1 Cor 6:20; 7:23).

Propitiation

Closely related to penal substitution is propitiation. From the Greek verb ἱλάσκεσθαι and its cognate noun ἱλαστήριον, propitiation refers to the necessity that God’s justice be satisfied (cf. also ἱλασμός in 1 John 2:2; 4:10).¹⁵ Because God is holy and righteous, he cannot overlook transgression (Exod 34:7; Num 14:18; Ps 5:4–6; Nah 1:2–3; Rom 1:18). Propitiation, therefore, focuses on God’s relationship to the sinner. God must be just in his justification of sinners.

Reconciliation

Throughout both testaments, it is clear not only that in our fallenness we are at enmity with God, but that God is also at enmity with us (Rom 5:10 and 11:28, for example, refer to us as having been the subjects of God’s enmity). So the result of God’s just wrath being satisfied is reconciliation (καταλλάσσω, καταλλαγή). The Old Testament background here is the transition from a state of war to a state of peace (שָׁלוֹם), a kingdom where only righteousness dwells. It is not only the lifting of the covenant’s curses but the positive harmony between erstwhile foes.

Just as we are first of all passive subjects of God’s wrath when God propitiates, we are passive subjects of God’s reconciliation at the cross. God reconciles himself to us and us to him (Rom 5:7–11). Central to the gospel’s announcement, then, is the fact that “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Cor 5:19; see also Col 1:19–20; Eph 2:11–22, esp. v. 14).

Christ’s active and passive obedience

We can group Israel’s sacrifices into two main types: thank offerings and guilt (or sin) offerings.

God created human beings in his image to live in gratitude before him all their days. In fact, the source of sin according to Paul in Romans 1 is the transition from no longer giving thanks to foolishness and futility (Rom 1:21).

The writer to the Hebrews points out that sin offerings bring full delight neither to the worshipers nor to God, since “in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year” (Heb 10:3; cf. 10:4–7, citing Ps 40:6–8). In contrast, a genuine thank offering—that is, a human life of grateful obedience—is greater than all of the bulls and goats on Israel’s altars.

When he said above, “You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings” (these are offered according to the law), then he added, “Behold, I have come to do your will.” He does away with the first [the old covenant sacrificial system] in order to establish the second [his own obedience]. And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. (Heb 10:8–10)

These two types of sacrifice—a thank offering and a sacrifice for guilt—are correlated in theology with Christ’s active and passive obedience. In his passive obedience (i.e., suffering), Jesus bears our sins, but in his active obedience he fulfills the law that we have failed to keep. Our guilt is transferred to him while his righteousness is imputed to us.

The thank offering was a tribute that demonstrated publicly the servant’s whole life of gratitude to the great king. Christ offered to the Father in our place a human nature wholly devoted to his righteousness. God prepared a body for the eternal Son to be given not only for atonement, but for that living obedience for which humanity was created. Even more than his sacrifice of atonement, the positive sacrifice of thanksgiving is God’s delight.

This high priestly ministry begins in his assumption of our humanity (Heb 2:10–11): “For their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth” (John 17:19). For good reason it has been suggested that the Gospels are passion narratives with long introductions. Everything Jesus taught and did is part of a life leading to Golgotha. In the words of the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), “During his whole life on earth, but especially at the end, Christ sustained in body and soul the anger of God against the sin of the whole human race” (HC Q. 37).

Therefore, it is essential that Christ was “born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law” (Gal 4:4–5). Not only the Sinai covenant but the wider covenant of creation provided the legal context for Christ’s entire ministry. This is the root problem that Israel faces. Like Adam, Israel lies under the dominion of sin and the curse of the law. So, as one “born under the law” (Gal 4:4), he lived a life of suffering not as a private individual but as a public representative, winning our redemption as much by his incarnation and daily obedience as by his death and resurrection.

Jesus is baptized by John “to fulfill all righteousness” (Matt 3:15). Then, in contrast to Adam and Israel, the messianic Servant refused autonomy. Adam and Israel “[demanded] the food they craved” (Ps 78:18). Whereas Jesus, in his forty-day temptation recapitulating Israel’s forty years in the wilderness, responds by appealing to “every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt 4:4; see also John 4:34). As the serpent repeats his strategy of abusing God’s word in order to lure Jesus into apostasy, this time the covenant servant refuses to be seduced.

Jesus’s entire life, however, was an extension of this trial of Adam in the garden and Israel in the wilderness. Peter’s attempt to distract Jesus from bearing his cross obediently was met with the sharpest rebuke: “Get behind me, Satan!” (Matt 16:23). Like Adam (and Israel), the disciples of Jesus have their thoughts set on earthly glory—their own kingdom of power—while the suffering servant sets his face toward the cross (John 12:27–32). For the first time, the world has an Adam and Israel has a king who will do only what he hears the Father say (John 5:19–20, 30, 43–44; 6:38; 8:26, 28–29, 50, 54; 10:37; 12:49–50).

Having fulfilled God’s law, Jesus undoes the curse of the first Adam, bearing its sanctions on the cross.

These references to Jesus’s victory over temptation and despair are not mere proof texts for his divinity. As a public representative and covenant head, the last Adam fulfills all righteousness on behalf of his people: He recapitulates Adam’s trial, submitting to his Father’s will in our place; having fulfilled God’s law, Jesus undoes the curse of the first Adam, bearing its sanctions on the cross. Adam and Israel failed to drive the serpent out of God’s garden, but a servant has arrived now who not only will cleanse the temple but is in his own person the true temple to which the earthly sanctuary merely pointed (John 1:14; 2:19–22).

How can God be both just and the justifier of the ungodly? The resolution is Christ’s obedience, both active and passive (Rom 3:31). In the obedience of this servant, Yahweh in fact becomes his people’s righteousness and sanctification in the power of the Spirit (Jer 23:6; 1 Cor 1:30; Rom 5:18; 2 Cor 5:21). In this way, believers are not only forgiven their sins but justified—that is, declared righteous by God’s imputation of Christ’s obedience to their account—and not only justified but renewed, and one day they will be glorified in union with their already-glorified head. In his priesthood, Christ is both the sovereign Lord of the covenant and the mediator who fulfills its stipulations and bears its sanctions on behalf of his people, whom he has loved from all eternity.

Conclusion

From the eternal covenant of redemption to Israel’s sacrificial system, from the prophetic anticipation of the suffering servant to Jesus’s own sense of mission, from the New Testament’s substitutionary language to its imagery of ransom, propitiation, and reconciliation—all of Scripture converges in the concept of penal substitution. In Jesus Christ, the damning verdict that believers had every right to expect at the last judgment is now poured out instead on Christ.

Michael Horton’s suggested resources on penal substitution

Additional resources on the atonement

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1. N. T. Wright, “The Letter of the Romans,” in New Interpreter’s Bible, ed. Leander E. Keck (Abingdon, 1994–2004), 10:574–75.
2. See, for instance, Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker, “For God So Loved the World?,” in Christianity, Patriarchy and Abuse: A Feminist Critique, ed. Joanne Carlson Brown and Carole R. Bohn (Pilgrim, 1989), 2.
3. John Stott, The Cross of Christ (InterVarsity, 1986), 158.
4. Against this is the nominalist error of theologians such as Peter Abelard and Hugo Grotius. Nominalism understands God’s decrees as arbitrary, not based in his own nature. That is, they believed God could declare whatever he wanted regardless of the facts on the ground. He need not be true to himself, demanding perfect conformity to his moral will or justice. Thus, he need not require an exact satisfaction for every sin. God can relax the strict demands of his law and accept in its place a virtuous response to the wounds of Christ, which the exhibition of God’s love or justice incites.
5. A good argument for righteous violence as necessary for divine hospitality, engaging especially with Rene Girard’s theories, is Hans Boersma, Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition (Baker Academic, 2006), esp. 25–62, 80–97, 133–52.
6. Albrecht Ritschl and other liberal theologians in the nineteenth-century articulated the sentiment that is held by many today when he eliminated the concept of divine wrath upon which the doctrine of propitiation rests. This is the whole thrust of Ritschl’s classic, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation: The Positive Development of the Doctrine, trans. H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macaulay (T&T Clark, 1900; repr., Wipf & Stock, 2004). So too, according to Anthony Bartlett, the New Testament really has no place for wrath and its propitiation: Cross Purposes: The Violent Grammar of Christian Atonement (Bloomsbury, 2001), 203–16. For an important orthodox analysis of Ritschl’s treatment (especially his rationalistic presuppositions), see B. B. Warfield, “Albrecht Ritschl on Justification and Reconciliation: Article I,” Princeton Theological Review 17 (1919): 533–84.
7. Anselm of Canterbury, Cur Deus Homo, 1:21, in The Major Works of Anselm of Canterbury, trans. Sidney Deane (Open Court, 1939).
8. Such ideas are presupposed in many critiques of PSA. See, for example, Clark Pinnock, A Wideness in God’s Mercy: The Finality of Jesus Christ in a World of Religions (Zondervan, 1992), esp. 49–80; Clark Pinnock and Robert Brow, Unbounded Love: A Good News Theology for the 21st Century (InterVarsity, 1994), esp. 100–105. I interact at length with such views in Lord and Servant: A Covenant Christology (Westminster John Knox, 2006), 178–207.
9. In fact, Jesus refers to Abel as the church’s first martyr and identifies the religious leaders who are plotting his own death as unwitting pawns in the serpent’s long war against the gospel (Matt 23:33–36).
10. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (SPCK, 1996), 605.
11. ἅπαξ or ἐφάπαξ (once and for all) appears repeatedly throughout Hebrews (9:12, 26, 28; 10:10).
12. On this point see Paul Ellingworth, Commentary on Hebrews, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Eerdmans, 1993), 372–73.
13. Commenting on the Last Supper, N. T. Wright observes at this point, “What then does the parallelism between the Temple-action and the Supper say about Jesus’ understanding of his death? It says, apparently, that Jesus intended his death to accomplish that which would normally be accomplished in and through the Temple itself. In other words, Jesus intended that his death should in some sense function sacrificially.” Jesus and the Victory of God, 604. After all, even in his ministry, Jesus “regularly acted as if he were able to bypass the Temple system in offering forgiveness to all and sundry right where they were.” Ibid., 605.
14. One early theory, attributed to Origen, was that in Christ’s death God paid a ransom to the devil. However, this was not picked up by later Christian writers. Some Church Fathers taught that Christ’s humanity was the bait on the hook that Satan swallowed. However, they do not treat it as a “theory” of the atonement but as a rich metaphor.
15. Propitiation was increasingly eliminated even from more conservative vocabularies in the wake of the New Testament scholar C. H. Dodd, who argued in 1931 that ἱλαστήριον should be translated “expiation” rather than “propitiation.” See C. H. Dodd, The Bible and the Greeks (Hodder & Stoughton, 1935), 82–95. Even NIV and NRSV translates ἱλαστήριον as “sacrifice of atonement” (“covering-over”; cf. Rom 3:25), which loses the force of the announcement that God’s anger has been fully assuaged—i.e., propitiated. The older translation (e.g., ESV) is closer to the meaning of the Greek noun. For refutations of Dodd’s interpretation, see Leon Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross (Eerdmans, 1984), 136–56; Roger Nicole, “C. H. Dodd and the Doctrine of Propitiation,” WTJ 17 (1954–1955): 117–57; and D. A. Carson, “Atonement in Romans 3:21–26,” in The Glory of The Atonement: Biblical, Historical, and Practical Perspectives, ed. C. E. Hill and F. A. James III (InterVarsity, 2004), 129.