Chris Evangelista
Dr. Joseph Mangina
WYT1101HF
28 November 2011
Penal Substitution
And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. Colossians 2:13-14
In chapter eight of The Apostolic Faith, David Yeago begins his discussion on the atonement by taking a look at two theories of atonement which he deems inadequate. The second theory, and the subject of this essay, is the doctrine of penal substitution. Yeago builds his case against this doctrine on three points: (1) that it creates a conflict between God’s love and justice, (2) that it presents the goal of Christ’s atoning work as God changing his attitude towards sinners, and (3) that scriptural support for Christ’s death as the substitution for punishment is weak.
In this essay, I will argue that Yeago does build a convincing case against penal substitution as an explanation for atonement. He does an inadequate job of presenting the strengths of penal substitution, choosing instead to present and counter points that work to his advantage when he goes on to present his own model of atonement. I will show that his first two points do not actually discredit or disprove penal substitution. In fact, the alternative that he proposes for these two points would seem to harmonize quite nicely with the doctrine. Furthermore, his third point – that the scriptural case for substitutionary punishment is weak – is itself ironically weak, as it relies merely on the argument that the scriptural conclusions made by proponents of penal substitution are “illogical”, rather than being based scripture itself.
Yeago’s first objection against penal substitution is that it places God’s love and justice in conflict with each other. This is wrong, he argues, because actually, what we must focus on is God’s love rather than his justice: “God is not composed of multiple attributes which could be in conflict with one another; the whole reality of God is the reality of his love” (Yeago, 305). Yeago quotes Ernst Sartorius in support for his statement, but makes no attempt at any further justification.
He then further argues that the result of this conflict is misconstruing God’s role as similar to a human judge in a criminal trial. This judge, because of the restrictions of the rule of law, would not be able to acquit the guilty, leading to the suggestion that there is a higher principle or standard (an “order of civil law” or a “civil community”) to which God is subject. An alternative model which Yeago suggests is to instead view God as both the plaintiff (the wronged party) and the judge (the standard of justice by which judgment is passed). In this way, God would not be “bound to inflict punishment for the wrongs done to him personally” (ibid). This is an important point on which Yeago would later build his own model of atonement.
These points of criticism which Yeago brings up against penal substitution are problematic. First, his declaration of love as the composition of God’s reality is not necessarily an argument against God’s justice. This is because scripture affirms that God’s love leads him just as much to punish wrongdoers, as it leads him to mercy. Indeed, his punishment can even be seen as an act of mercy in itself: “My son, do not despise the Lord’s discipline or be weary of his reproof” (Prov. 3:11, ESV). To be sure, this verse refers to the Lord’s discipline for the purpose of correction, but at the same time it does provide a basis for God to be taking “retributive” action which Yeago’s argument might seem to exclude. More importantly, this tension between love and justice which Yeago denies seems to actually be a part of the Lord’s declaration of his own character, as he reveals himself to Moses in Exodus 34:6b-7: The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation. (ESV) Clearly this tension is not merely a man-conceived notion about the Lord with which we must struggle.
The second problem with Yeago’s criticism is his solution of declaring the Lord both judge and plaintiff; Not the solution is wrong, but that it cannot be proposed as a solution exclusively for his own model of atonement. While it is certainly true that proponents of penal substitution most often conceive of God as the judge who imposes penalties for sins, it does not follow that these same proponents would disagree with Yeago’s vision of God as judge and plaintiff. In fact it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that they would agree with Yeago’s assessment of God’s role in relation to sin, but for different reasons. I believe that the in the penal substitution model, the fact that God is also himself the injured party serves to elevate the magnitude and grievousness of sin: “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment.” (Ps. 51:4, ESV). In contrast to this, Yeago uses the fact to advance his argument that God, being both the injured party and standard of judgment, can choose not to inflict punishment, relegating a different purpose to the atonement, the satisfaction of our honour before God.
Closely related to this first Yeago’s first objection to penal atonement is his second: that the result of the conflict between God’s love and justice is the need for God to be reconciled to us, rather than the need for our being reconciled to him. Yeago argues that this is wrong because there is a shift occurring on “whose problem” the need for redemption is: “The problem of redemption, which Christ’s death addresses, is thus located, in a certain sense, in God rather than in us: it is because God is obligated by his own justice to be angry with sinners and punish them that we are in need of redemption” (Yeago, 305-306; author’s emphasis). In effect, God is the “bad guy” here, because he is unable to overcome the demands of his justice and simply forgive sinners. He then further argues that this “reversal” stands in contradiction with the doctrine of penal substitition’s own insistence that it is sin that we need to be saved from.
The unwritten conclusion here is of course that proponents of penal substitution believe that it is actually God that we need to be saved from, and not sin. And in a sense, even using Yeago’s earlier argument that God is both plaintiff and judge, this is true. The question is, is God at fault for this? Well, let me begin to try to answer that with another question: “Would it be the fault of Niagara Falls if I drowned trying to swim in it?” Certainly not! For it would my own foolishness, knowing the dangers of this act, that would do me in. Likewise, it is not God’s fault that he is holy and just, and we are sinful and deserve punishment. It would be hard to imagine a proponent of penal substitution trying to argue otherwise.
What then of Yeago’s assessment that the reversal in penal substitution means that God needs to change his attitude towards us. Well, it is likewise true in a sense. But problematic, it is not. As Yeago himself says of God in chapter three of The Apostolic Faith: “According to Israel’s Scriptures, YHWH has chosen to meet his creatures within the wordly, historical space which has he (sic) created for them to inhabit. He chooses to draw near to them and speak to them and live out a history with them” (Yeago, 111). To be sure, in this chapter, Yeago is speaking of God’s interaction with his chosen people, Israel. But nonetheless, it seems odd that he would so readily apply this notion of God choosing to draw near to a people who repeatedly disappointed God and turned away from him, but not to an understanding of atonement in which God chooses to draw near to his people by appeasing that within himself that would not allow him to do so. Sin is very much the problem that we need to be saved from, and Jesus’ atonement indeed takes away this sin allowing us to be reconciled to God. But it is true that in a sense, this does mean that God’s justice is the one we need to be saved from – through no fault of his own, and that he draws near to us because of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross.
Yeago’s final, and weakest, argument against the doctrine of penal substitution is the perceived illogicalness of the scriptural conclusions made by its proponents. His argument is simply this: “when Scripture says that Jesus ‘bore our sins in his own body on the tree’ it does not follow that he bore them in order to render to divine justice a proportionate punishment for sin” (Ibid, 306). This is striking because in effect, Yeago argues that penal substitution lacks a scriptural basis by himself choosing not to appeal to scripture. Instead, he corrects the “illogical” conclusions that penal substitution makes, quoting 1 Peter 2:24 along the way. Again, here Yeago falls well short of making his case by not presenting a stronger scriptural case for Jesus bearing the divine punishment for our sin. He could have, for example, chosen Colossians 2:13-14 to struggle with: “And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by cancelling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross” (ESV). Here, scripture clearly states that God forgave our trespasses by certain legal demands being made against us by nailing these demands to the cross.
In this essay, I showed that David Yeago’s arguments against penal substitution were incomplete and inadequate, and were unable to disprove the doctrine. He made two arguments and proposed two solutions, both of which I showed were not really arguments against penal substitution at all, but can just as easily been shown to be arguments for it. This is because it seemed that his purpose in this chapter really was not to convincingly disprove the doctrine, but to advance a case for his own model of atonement. Yeago then went on to make one final, shorter, argument concerning the scriptural conclusions made in the doctrine. This, I found was itself ironically weak in scripture, as he chose to merely to make logical conclusions about one passage used to defend penal substitution, but not to struggle with the strongest passages that do the same.
In this essay, I had not attempted to disprove Yeago’s model of atonement: satisfaction of our honour before God. Though I disagree with some points that he makes – especially that God, as both the wronged party and the standard of justice by which judgement is passed can simply forgive sins – I do believe that in some sense he is correct in asserting that part of the purpose of atonement is to correct the dishonour our sin does to our relationship with God. Thus, if it had been in the scope (and within the space limitations of this assignment), I believe that it would be have been possible to find harmony between Yeago’s satisfaction model and with penal substitution. Nonetheless, Yeago erred on this point: that he simply did not present penal substitution in its strongest points. He merely presented those points that, with his refutations, served to advance his purpose.
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