Easing Comer’s Fears on Penal Substitution - by Derek Rishmawy

Found here. Our comments in bold.

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The author wants us to accept the Reformist/Calvinist view of Jesus' sacrificial death, but doesn't give us a single biblical reason to do so. In fact, thought he provides a long quote from Calvin, he only manages to quote a single tangential Bible verse.

We must deem this Bad Bible Teaching.

Jesus' death was sacrificial, not substitutionary, for He spilled His blood to wash us clean:

He. 13:12 And so Jesus also suffered outside the city gate to make the people holy through his own blood.

1Jn. 1:7 ...and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. 

Why? The OT sacrifices were typological, representative of the greater work of Christ. So in substance there are direct parallels between a sacrificed lamb and the sacrificed Lamb of God:

• The animal wasn't punished. Jesus wasn't punished.
• The animal didn't substitute. Jesus didn't substitute.
• No one was wrathful toward the animal. No one was wrathful toward Jesus.
• There was no need to punish the sacrificed animal, the blood was enough. There was no need to punish Jesus, His blood is enough.

We discuss PSA in more detail here.

Why is this important? Because when Jesus offered Himself He totally pleased the Father. His spilled blood washed away our sins. He was not forsaken, punished, or abandoned. 

We must not dishonor God by misrepresenting Him.

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Best-selling author and former pastor John Mark Comer has worries about evangelical (Reformed/Calvinist) views of the atonement. In a series of recent Instagram posts, he pointed to Andrew Rillera’s book Lamb of the Free as putting the nail in the coffin of penal substitution (PSA - Penal Substitutionary Atonement.)

—widely viewed as a central aspect of the meaning of Christ’s death in Protestantism. (Reformed/Calvinist.

Indeed. But the prevalence of a viewpoint is not the biblical case.)

After understandable dismay and pushback, Comer apologized for his carelessness in the way he commended the book, and clarified his concerns with penal substitution. Comer’s concerns merit reflection as his struggles with the theological underpinnings of penal substitution reflect common confusions in the pews. (Comer might be mistaken, but we don't think he's struggling or confused.)

Comer’s statements explain the initial appeal of the Lamb of the Free:

There are a growing number of us are conservative (in the older sense of the word) and orthodox who struggle to map some of the modern Western ideas of atonement onto the New Testament and most of church history, namely, the claim that the Father poured out his wrath on Jesus in the form of retributive justice/violence rather than on us. (An idea that begins with a possible misreading of Leviticus)…I believe the Father AND THE SON (and the Holy Spirit) were working TOGETHER to save and redeem us through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. All motivated by mercy and love, while still maintaining justice. Jesus has done for us what we could never, ever do for ourselves.

I want to review some good biblical and historic answers to these concerns, (We would be content with biblical answers.)

so we might rest more assured in the glory of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit’s work to save us in Christ’s death in our place. (He did not die in our place. We must also die, participating in the death of Christ ourselves so as to join Him in His resurrection [Ph. 3:10-11]. It is therefore impossible for Him to die in our place if we must die too.)

Alleviating Comer’s Concerns

1. PSA Isn’t Novel or Merely Western

Forms of penal substitution teaching can be found in the fathers and medievals. It’s all over church history. Chapter 4 of Joshua McNall’s The Mosaic of Atonement is instructive. Relatedly, it isn’t simply a “Western doctrine.” It is affirmed globally. My uncles who are pastors in Latin America preach it, and my Nigerian, Korean, Chinese, and Indonesian brothers and sisters in grad school all received it from their churches back home before they arrived in the States. (Ok, but where is it found in the Bible?)

2. PSA Isn’t Exclusive but Expansive

Penal substitution need not exclude any of the other varied accomplishments of the cross, as some often suppose. As Paul says, Christ conquers the Devil by forgiving our sins through cancelling our guilt in the condemnation of the cross (Col. 2:14). Many works could be consulted here, but Jeremy Treat’s The Atonement: An Introduction admirably lists and seamlessly integrates a host of dimensions to Christ’s perfect work. (Ok, but where is it found in the Bible?)

3. PSA Is Trinitarian

Pastors can run afoul by preaching an atonement theory that splits apart the work of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. This mistake must be rejected. The three persons of the Trinity are wholly united in their work of redemption. (See the first two chapters of Thomas McCall, Forsaken: The Trinity, the Cross, and Why It Matters.) (Ok, but where is it found in the Bible?)

Which God Atones?

The reformers taught, as Scripture does, (Ah, Scripture. Good. We await the biblical case.)

that God is forever Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He is immutable (unchangeable). He is impassible (unable to suffer in his divine being, which explains why Jesus assumes human nature in the first place). (???)

He is simple (he is not made up of parts and can’t be divided into bits, even into the persons). The triune God has one nature, one will, and one power. So everything God does is done by all of God—the Father, Son, and Spirit inseparably and indivisibly. As Gregory of Nyssa says, “There is one motion . . . which proceeds from the Father, through the Son, to the Spirit” (An Answer to Ablabius). (We hope the author will get to the point.)

We see in the New Testament a loving Father sending the loving Son to become incarnate as our Messiah and King. Jesus acts on our behalf, in the power of the Spirit (of love), to live, to obey, to heal, teach, preach, suffer, be rejected, and crucified at the hands of sinful men and women. (Yes, yes. What does all this this have to do with PSA?)

He endures the judgment that our sins deserve. (This is the point to be proved. We shall not permit the author to simply assert it.)

I have often looked to Jesus’s words in John 10:17–18: “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.” (Finally, a Scripture quote, the only one. But it only is provided to prove an ancillary point that is not under debate.)

Jesus affirms that he and the Father are of one will in our salvation. The Son freely comes in the flesh, to lay down his life, to offer himself on our behalf “through the eternal Spirit” (Heb. 9:14), and the Father loves him for it in the eternal Spirit. As John Owen argued, penal substitution counts on Christ’s Spirit-graced life being pleasing to God to work. (Not quite sure what this sentence means. 

In actual fact, the Father was well-pleased before Jesus did a single thing [Mt. 3:17].  He was the Lamb slain from the creation of the world [Re. 13:8] yet He would not appear on earth for thousands of years after creation. 

There was no requirement and no need for Him to please the Father with a sinless life. The life He led as a sinless Man was certainly true and prophetically spoken of, but His spilled blood was the effectual agent of our forgiveness [Ro. 3:25, Ro. 5:9, Col. 1:20].)

Wrath and Love?

OK, but how can we claim that Jesus suffers God’s wrath and still affirm that God loves him? (Jesus didn't suffer the Father's wrath. There is no verse that tells He suffered the Father's wrath.)

Even Calvin wrestled with this question:

Yet we do not suggest that God was ever inimical or angry toward him. How could he be angry toward his beloved Son, “in whom his heart reposed” [cf. Matthew 3:17]? How could Christ by his intercession appease the Father toward others, if he were himself hateful to God? This is what we are saying: he bore the weight of divine severity, since he was “stricken and afflicted” [cf. Isaiah 53:5] by God’s hand, (Actually, we find these things in verse 4, not 5: 

 

Is. 53:4 Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted.

Notice the first phrase of the sentence is Isaiah's prophetic statement, but the second phrase begins with "yet." "Yet we considered him...." This points to our mistaken viewpoint, that He was stricken, smitten, and afflicted by God. Isaiah's point is that He wasn't. 

He continues his prophetic description in verse 5, here beginning the sentence with a "but." So, between the "yet" and the "but" Isaiah was describing and correcting a false perspective. Here's the entire quote: 

Is. 53:4 Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. 5 But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.

See it now? It's so important that we do not carry our doctrines into Scripture and thus pollute our understanding by sifting the Bible through preconceptions.) 

and experienced all the signs of a wrathful and avenging God. (Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.xvi.11)

Remember, first, God is impassible. (Why is this important?)

He doesn’t suffer, his affections and emotions aren’t reactions to provocations like that of finite humans. Wrath speaks of God’s infinitely holy, perfect will in its opposition to sin. It wills to remove and treat sin as it deserves. It’s not a violent flare-up or a convulsion in his nature.

This is why sometimes it’s helpful to simply think of wrath as emotive language for God’s justice. It’s a biblical way of expressing that his justice isn’t an abstraction, it’s a personal reality to which he’s committed. God is opposed to idolatry, to rape, to racism, to abuse, to theft, to murder, to bloodshed, and to exploiting the poor. God’s wrath will treat these atrocities as he has promised he would. Whatever theology of atonement we advocate, it must deal with the severity of our injustice, the howls of human oppression, the blood of Abel crying out from the ground for a just answer. Don’t our hearts long for this?

Remember, second, it’s God’s justice—all of God. It’s the justice of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So whatever judgment Jesus suffers—it’s also the judgment of the eternal Son. (Jesus didn't suffer judgment.)

Sometimes in theology, we “appropriate” a work to one person of the Trinity in the history of redemption even though all of them equally participate in the work. We speak of the Son’s incarnation because only the Son becomes incarnate, but by the power of the Spirit by the will of the Father (Luke 1:35–37), or creation as the work of the Father (Gen. 1:1), through the Son (John 1:1–5; Col. 1:16), and the Spirit (Gen. 1:3).

Something like this is happening in the judgment the Son endures. (Jesus didn't endure any judgment.)

The Father sent Jesus to suffer and handed him over (John 3:16; Rom 8:3, 32), so judgment is said to be the Father’s, though it is that of the triune God as a whole. (The Father didn't judge Jesus.)

Remember, third, the Son suffers this judgment in his human flesh. (Jesus did not suffer the Father's judgment.)

It was Jesus the incarnate Son who was handed over to suffer death as one of us. Jesus is the last Adam, so he could endure in his human soul and body the judgment on sin (This did not happen.)

that the triune God set upon it long ago in the garden (Gen. 3). The Son underwent these things in his humanity as our representative and substitute. He endured God’s wrath for us in his humanity. (He did not wrath.)

God Who Self-Substitutes

John Stott famously wrote about the cross as the “self-substitution” of God. God takes our place in Christ because we took his place in our sin. (This didn't happen either.)

This is glory. This is mystery. This is grace. This is good news worth wrestling with until we get a blessing.

To that end, check out these additional resources:

1. The Crucified King by Jeremy Treat

2. Atonement, Law, and Justice by Adonis Vidu

3. Atonement: A Guide for the Perplexed by Adam Johnson