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THE DOCTRINE OF THE ATONEMENT:
POPULAR EVANGELICALISM AND THE BIBLE
“So Jesus came to save us from God?” I met her at a conference, and she was now trying to organize in her mind the implications of what she had been taught about the death of Christ. She could see that there must be something wrong with the conclusion she had reached, but could not see another way forward in light of the teaching she had received. Snippets of sermons and more systematic teaching in study groups had conveyed to her the message that Jesus’ death was a self-offering to God whereby he bore the punishment God would otherwise have inflicted on human beings, and so turned away God’s hostility towards us.

The understanding of the atonement which she was struggling to express is widely known as the theory of “penal substitution.” The best exponents of the doctrine have been careful to safeguard it against the distortion which drives a wedge between an angry Father and a loving Son. But however carefully the more sophisticated expositions of penal substitution may be expressed, it seems to be almost inevitable that the doctrine should suffer distortion by the time it has reached ordinary Christians such as the friend whom I mentioned at the beginning. And popular hymns and choruses serve to express and reinforce the distortion.

Consider, for example, the following lines: ““He was pierced for our transgressions, and bruised for our iniquities; and to bring us peace he was punished  (Maggi Dawn). Here we have a paraphrase of Isa 53:5, in which “punished” is a dubious translation of the Hebrew mûsar. Thus is the idea reinforced and celebrated, that on the cross Jesus was bearing instead of us the punishment inflicted by the Father. And it is only a short step from this to the question of my friend at the conference. It is time to ask whether this doctrine of the atonement, and the understanding of divine judgment which underlies it, are as firmly based in Scripture as is commonly supposed.

Penal Substitution
New Testament writers do not generally speak of divine judgment in terms of God imposing retributive punishments upon human acts of wrongdoing. Rather, they see judgment expressed in people’s experience of the consequences of their choices and actions. Retribution, strictly speaking, refers to a penalty or punishment inflicted on a wrongdoer from outside, not intrinsically “built into” the act to which it is attached. But NT writers understand both salvation and condemnation primarily in relational terms: people’s destinies will not be imposed on them as reward or punishment, but will be a confirmation and intensification of the relationship with God or alienation from him which has been their experience in this life.

In the Gospels we find Jesus speaking of God’s judgment not so much in terms of penalties imposed by divine retributive justice but in relational terms, in terms of being in or out of God’s presence (e.g., Mark 8:38; Luke 13:27; Matt 25:41; John 3:19-21, 36; 12:46-48).

In Paul’s letters we find the themes of judgment and atonement brought more explicitly into connection with each other. And these documents are usually understood as the main biblical source of the penal substitution theory. But what if Paul’s understanding of divine judgment is something like that which I have just outlined? It would make a crucial difference, as I shall now try to argue, taking one key passage as a test case:

“...Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement [or “propitiation”] by his blood, effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed; it was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus.” (Rom 3:24-26, NRSV)

This tightly argued passage has been a key text for advocates of the theory of penal substitution. The word which NRSV translates “sacrifice of atonement” is normally given by them the meaning “propitiation”—a meaning which it has at least sometimes in the QT (e.g., Num 16:46; Dan 9:16). In other words, Paul is saying not that Christ’s death serves to expiate or take away sin, but that it turns away God’s wrath. Since the wrath of God has been a major theme from Rom 1:18 onwards, it would be odd if Paul’s exposition of the work of Christ in this passage did not include an explanation of how the threat of this wrath is removed. So, according to the penal substitution theory, the death of Christ is to be understood as a sacrifice which satisfies God’s wrath against human sin, a sacrifice which he accepts instead of punishing human beings with his wrath. Thus God’s righteousness or justice is demonstrated. He has found a way of delivering us from his wrath not by ignoring human sinfulness—which would be unjust—but by himself bearing, in the person of Christ, the punishment of sin. The NT writers “see Christ as suffering in such a way as to remove from God the stigma of being unjust in remitting our penalty” (L. Morris, The Cross in the New Testament [Paternoster, 1966] 388).

This interpretation involves seeing a tension, a potential contradiction, in Paul’s use of ‘righteous” and “justifies” (which have the same word root in Greek) in the final part of v 26: because God does not withhold punishment but takes it upon himself he is able to uphold his righteousness or justice even while justifying the sinner.

Despite its impressive pedigree, it is questionable whether this interpretation conveys what Paul actually means. There are two points to be made. The first has to do with the reference to expiation or propitiation. A long debate (summarized in the standard commentaries) has polarized the meaning of these two terms. But whichever meaning may have been at the front of Paul’s mind, he surely intended to say both that through the work of Christ human sin is expiated or canceled and that the wrath of Rom 1:18ff. therefore hangs no longer over those who have faith in Jesus.

However, to say that Christ’s death has the effect of removing God’s wrath does not commit us to the penal theory. It is a question of how Paul actually understand “the wrath of God.” In Rom 1:1 8ff. Paul declares that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven.” But what he goes on to describe is not the retributive inflicting of punishment by God “from outside,” but God’s allowing people to experience the consequences of their refusal to live in relationship with him. Three times Paul says, “God gave them up  (Rom 1:24, 26, 28, alluding to Ps 106:41). People abandon God; therefore he allows them to experience the effects of the resulting alienation.

God’s wrath is his judgment experienced as alienation from God. At the cross God did not suffer punishment from God and thereby avert his wrath; he entered into humanity’s experience of sin’s consequences so as to destroy sin and thereby to restore people to relationship with God.

The second point concerns the meaning of “righteousness” in vv 25-26. Rather than seeing a tension between the upholding of God’s justice and his justifying of sinners, commentators are increasingly coming to recognize that “righteous” here expresses the same meaning as the initial declaration of God’s righteousness in Rom 1:17. It is, as in the OT, God’s loyalty to his covenant by which he commits himself to restore and sustain Israel (see, e.g., Isa 51:5, 6, 8, where “deliverance” in NRSV represents the Hebrew root tsdq, elsewhere translated “righteousness”). But now in the gospel this covenant loyalty is seen to embrace a saving purpose for all who have faith—Gentiles as well as Jews (Rom 1:16-17). Paul does not mean, therefore, that God had to find a way of expressing his wrath and punishment against sin so as to be able to justify sinners without abandoning his justice. To say that God “is righteous and that he justifies the one who has faith in Jesus” means that he demonstrates his faithfulness and promise of salvation by accepting those who have faith in Jesus (see J.A. Ziesler, Paul’s Letter to the Romans [SCM, 1989] 115-16; J.D.G. Dunn, Romans 1-8 [Word, 1988] 173-76).

If these considerations hold true, it is misleading to attribute to Paul the idea that on the cross Christ bore divine punishment and thereby diverted such punishment from the rest of humanity. And so a “penal” theory of the atonement does not exactly represent his teaching. This is not to deny that God takes human sin with absolute seriousness, or that Christ on the cross experienced divine judgment on our behalf. But it is to suggest that to speak of Christ on the cross suffering our “punishment” is to go further than the NT writers themselves go.

What Paul’s language does imply, I believe, is that Christ entered into and bore on our behalf the destructive consequences of sin. Standing where we stand, he experienced—and thereby exhausted—the consequences of our alienation from God. In him God took responsibility for the world’s evil and absorbed the pain and destructiveness of it into himself. This understanding of the work of Christ does not drive a wedge between the Father and the Son, as the language of punishment is almost bound to, however carefully its advocates may seek to guard against such unfortunate implications. It makes clear that atonement is achieved not by the Father (immorally?) transferring punishment from all humanity onto an innocent victim, but by God taking upon himself the destructive consequences of sin.

“Christ died for all...”
However, if I am willing to jettison the word “penal,” I will not so readily let go of “substitution.” The notion of substitution has clear biblical warrant, for example in Jesus’ description of his self-giving as “a ransom instead of many” (Mark 10:45). It affirms that Christ has done for us what we could never do for ourselves. He “stands in for us” when we would be lost without him. And that is the heart of the NT’s proclamation of the grace of God. There is something objective about what the cross achieved, something which happened there before, and apart from, any human response.

Paul himself holds together “objectivity” and “subjectivity” in atonement. He frequently puts side by side statements which on their own might naturally be understood to express one theme or the other. There are a number of passages where Paul has a statement such as “Christ died for us” (as our substitute) followed immediately by the words “so that” and a clause expressing our participation in Christ our representative (e.g., Rom 8:3-4; 14:9; 2 Cor 5:15, 21; 1 Thess 5:9-10).

The form of those sentences, “Christ died for us, so that...,” implies that in his death Christ achieved something objectively before the fruits of it were available to the subjective experience of those who have faith in him. Our “participation” in Christ crucified and risen depends on his first “dying for us.” The varieties of Paul’s language about Christ’s death cannot simply be collapsed into the theme of participation. We are unlikely to find a doctrine of the atonement which does justice both to Christian tradition and to human experience unless we take seriously Paul’s insistence on the objectivity of what Christ achieved as well as his exhilaration at how people are transformed by participation in Christ. The evangelical tradition’s stress on an objective atonement, through which God in Christ achieved for us the salvation which would otherwise be unobtainable, is not the whole story. But without it there is no story worth telling.

By Stephen H. Travis, Vice-Principal, St John’s College. Nottingham, England. 
(The perspectives summarized here are expressed more fully in Travis’ articles on “Judgment” in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, 408-11; and Dictionary of Paul and His Letters, 516-17; “Wrath of God (NT)” in Anchor Bible Dictionary, 6:996-98; and “Christ as Bearer of Divine Judgment in Paul’s Thought and the Atonement,” in Jesus of Nazareth: Lord and Christ [ed. J.B. Green and M. Turner (Wm.B. Eerdmans, 1994)] 332-45. This last article also forms part of Atonement Today [ed. J.E. Goldingay; SPCK, 1995], in which contributors explore from various perspectives how the atonement may be understood today.)