Penal substitution attacked /affirmed and attacked using Early Church fathers

http://www.creedcodecult.com/it-is-finished/ good summary here and good comment section on St Augustine

http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/

An article against Penal Substitution by an non-catholic named Steve Chalke

http://adrianwarnock.com/chalkeoncross.pdf

A response to this article is given by Dr. Garry Williams who quotes Early church documents which he says supports Penal Substitution: http://www.theologian.org.uk/doctrine/punished.html

An article which attacks the notion that the Early Church Fathers' taught Penal Substitution:

http://therebelgod.com/AtonementFathersEQ.pdf

comment 17 here: http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/

Regarding your second question, what I said in the post above, and what Andrew said in the link you included, are fully compatible. Christ really is our substitute. He really did bear the curse, by bearing in His body the suffering and dissolution of death, and by bearing in His spirit the desolation that is the absence of spiritual consolation. By taking these upon Himself, freely, in self-sacrificial love, Christ offered something more pleasing to the Father than all our sins are displeasing. And in that way Christ merited for us the grace by which our sins are forgiven, we are restored to friendship with God, and we are saved from the punishment of hell. So Christ bears the curse, and in doing so participates in our punishment (i.e. the punishment of the curse), so that we can participate in His divine life, and avoid the ultimate punishment (i.e. eternal separation from God, in hell). In that (carefully qualified) sense, Christ’s atonement was one of penal substitution. But it was not one in which the Father imputed all our sins to Christ, and then poured out all His wrath for that sin, on Christ. The Father never hated the Son or hated any sin in the Son, because the Son was always sinless, and God the Father always sees the Son as the Son really is, sinless. Christ took on all human sin not by becoming intrinsically guilty (and thus deserving of punishment), or by imputation (and thus being falsely accused by an omniscient Being), but by (1) allowing Himself to suffer the effects of the curse, and (2) by seeing all the sin of all men for what it is in all its evil, and in solidarity with us (as one sharing our nature), with the grief of contrition freely and lovingly offering Himself as a perfect sacrifice for it.  

from comment 18:

In His human nature, with His human intellect, He saw all the sins of all men, and how evil they are, and how they offend God who deserves all our love and obedience. That’s the sense in which these iniquities fell on Him, not in the sense that He became guilty in Himself, or guilty in the eyes of the Trinity. They were laid on Him in the sense that He saw all the sins of His brothers and sisters in His human family, and as the great high priest of all mankind, He, in solidarity with us, grieving over these sins of His human family, offered Himself to the Father as the perfect sacrifice for all these sins.

There seems to be a lot more than mere “solidarity” going on here. There seems to be a link between our iniquities being laid on him and the bruising and chastisement being described.

Of course there is a link. Human suffering and death are the result of iniquity. In His Passion Christ is freely bearing the curse of suffering and death to offer Himself as a perfect sacrifice to the Father for the iniquities that have been laid upon Him.

from 25:

At the Easter vigil the reading about Abraham being called by God to sacrifice Isaac made me think of this article. How can this foreshadow God giving up his only son if the theory of penal substitution is correct? Nobody was being punished for anything. The sacrifice was all about whether Abraham was willing to give up something of “infinite” value to him. This seems to fit with other examples of sacrifice from the Old Testament (I’m thinking particularly of Cain and Abel) where a sacrifice is an offering to God of something of value, not God pouring out wrath on something (how could God pour out wrath on a vegetable offering?). Moving from there to the New Testament, it makes sense of how we can say that our lives are now a living sacrifice, i.e. an offering to God. Is this correct?


 from comment 26 by Bryan:

Thanks for your comment, and your question. All three of the [synoptic] Gospel writers refer to the darkness that fell over the whole land from the sixth hour (i.e. noon) until the ninth hour (i.e. 3 pm). (Cf. Matthew 27:45, Mark 15:33, and Luke 23:44.) But so far as I know, none of the Church Fathers interpret this as an indication that God the Father ‘turned His back’ on the Son. This was a sign to those who had called “crucify him, crucify him,” just as darkness was one of the plagues of Egypt before the Passover, a sign that they were opposing God, and that they should repent. This was creation groaning over what was being done to its Creator.

As for the meaning of Christ’s cry “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” we should not understand that as meaning that the Son (in His divine nature) was cut off from the Trinity or separated from the perfect happiness of the divine life. But in His human nature He experienced what it is like to be handed over to His enemies and to suffer and die. In those respects He was forsaken. Likewise, in His human nature he experienced the absence of spiritual consolation, and in that respect too He was forsaken, even though He (in His human nature) did not cease to behold the Father. He spoke these words as man, that is, according to His human nature. But the Father never ceased to love Him, nor did the Father’s love for the Son ever diminish in the least. Everything the Son experienced on the cross, He Himself willed to experience, including these ways of being forsaken in His human nature. I recommend listening to the talk at this link.

from comment 29 (Bryanhttp://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/09/does-the-bible-teach-sola-fide/#comment-2388

How did the Father “make him to be sin”? The Holy Spirit says, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” 2 Cor 5:21 (ESV).

The meaning is that Christ became a sin offering, a sacrifice for sin. St. Augustine explains:

The same Apostle says in another place, “He made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin.” “Him who knew no sin:” Who is He who knew no sin, but He That said, “Behold the prince of the world comes, and shall find nothing in me? Him who knew no sin, made He sin for us;” even Christ Himself, who knew no sin, God made sin for us. What does this mean, Brethren? If it were said, “He made sin upon Him,” or, “He made Him to have sin;” it would seem intolerable; how do we tolerate what is said, “He made Him sin,” that Christ Himself should be sin? They who are acquainted with the Scriptures of the Old Testament recognise what I am saying. For it is not an expression once used, but repeatedly, very constantly, sacrifices for sins are called “sins.” A goat, for instance, was offered for sin, a ram, anything; the victim itself which was offered for sin was called “sin.” A sacrifice for sin then was called “sin;” so that in one place the Law says, “That the Priests are to lay their hands upon the sin.” “Him” then, “who knew no sin, He made sin for us;” that is, “He was made a sacrifice for sin.” (Sermon 84 on the New Testament)

And elsewhere he writes:

Accordingly the apostle says: “We beseech you in Christ’s stead, be reconciled unto God. For He has made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” (2 Corinthians 5:20-21) God, therefore, to whom we are reconciled, has made Him to be sin for us—that is to say, a sacrifice by which our sins may be remitted; for by sins are designated the sacrifices for sins. And indeed He was sacrificed for our sins, the only one among men who had no sins, even as in those early times one was sought for among the flocks to prefigure the Faultless One who was to come to heal our offenses. (On the Grace of Christ and on Original Sin, Book II, chapter 37)

And elsewhere he writes:

And they, perchance not understanding this, and being blinded by the desire of misrepresentation, and ignorant of the number of ways in which the name of sin is accustomed to be used in the Holy Scriptures, declare that we affirm sin of Christ. Therefore we assert that Christ both had no sin—neither in soul nor in the body; and that, by taking upon Him flesh in the likeness of sinful flesh, in respect of sin He condemned sin. And this assertion, somewhat obscurely made by the apostle, is explained in two ways—either that the likenesses of things are accustomed to be called by the names of those things to which they are like, so that the apostle may be understood to have intended to call this likeness of sinful flesh by the name of “sin;” or else that the sacrifices for sins were under the law called “sins,” all which things were figures of the flesh of Christ, which is the true and only sacrifice for sins—not only for those which are all washed away in baptism, but also for those which afterwards creep in from the weakness of this life, on account of which the universal Church daily cries in prayer to God, “Forgive us our debts,” and they are forgiven us by means of that singular sacrifice for sins which the apostle, speaking according to the law, did not hesitate to call “sin.” Whence, moreover, is that much plainer passage of his, which is not uncertain by any twofold ambiguity, “We beseech you in Christ’s stead to be reconciled to God. He made Him to be sin for us, who had not known sin; that we might be the righteousness of God in Him.” (2 Corinthians 5:20-21) For the passage which I have above mentioned, “In respect of sin, He condemned sin,” because it was not said, “In respect of his sin,” may be understood by any one, as if He said that He condemned sin in respect of the sin of the Jews; because in respect of their sin who crucified Him, it happened that He shed His blood for the remission of sins. But this passage, where God is said to have made Christ Himself “sin,” who had not known sin, does not seem to me to be more fittingly understood than that Christ was made a sacrifice for sins, and on this account was called “sin.” (Against Two Books of the Pelagians, Bk III, chapter 16)

And here I showed the contrast between R.C. Sproul and St. Augustine on the sense in which Christ bore the curse.

see also :http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/09/john-calvins-worst-heresy-that-christ-suffered-in-hell/

from Bryan's comment 41 here: http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/

But what is notable about Roger’s post is what I continue to find among Protestant theologians — namely, a seeming unawareness of any other conception of substitutionary atonement than that of the Father pouring out His divine wrath and everlasting punishment for our sins, on the Son in His suffering and death. But in fact, when the Church Fathers speak of Christ being our sacrificial substitute and bearing our sins, they are speaking not of God the Father pouring out His wrath for our sins, on Christ. They are speaking rather of Christ bearing the curse of suffering and [physical] death, that curse described in Genesis 3 (see, for example, what St. Augustine says here.), and they are speaking of Christ offering Himself up to the Father as both a perfect high priest and a perfect victim, a perfect sacrifice of love, a gift of greater love than the injustice of all our sins. This is the conception of the atonement St. Anselm and St. Thomas later expounded and developed, and which I have described in the post above. It contrasts very distinctly with the Protestant notion epitomized below by R.C. Sproul. At 6’45″ in this video, Sproul says that God the Father says to the Son on the cross, “God damn you.”

to
Sproul seems to interpret Christ bearing the curse as God the Father hating (lit. damning) the Son, and pouring out His wrath for our sin on the Son, who receives upon Himself the Father’s wrath equivalent to everlasting punishment in hell, for our sins. But that’s not how St. Augustine or St. Thomas understood the curse. That would either make the Father the perpetrator of the greatest evil of all time, i.e. pouring out the punishment for all human sin (or at least that of the elect) on an innocent man, knowing that he is innocent (see this video), or if Christ were really guilty and deserved all that punishment, then Christ’s suffering would be of no benefit to us.

Some Protestants think that God pouring out His wrath and punishment for all human sin on an innocent man, knowing that he is innocent, is fine, so long as that man volunteered to suffer it. Roger Olson seems to think that as well. But what makes it unjust to punish an innocent man for another’s crime is not just that the innocent man doesn’t wish to be punished, or didn’t volunteer to be punished, but that he is innocent. When, at the end of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities Sydney Carton secretly takes Darnay’s place on the way to the guillotine, this is not an unjust act on Carton’s part. But if the judge were knowingly to execute an innocent man, for the crimes of another, that would be an unjust act on the part of the judge.

The reason why punishing an innocent person (knowing that he is innocent) for the crimes of another is unjust, whether or not the person wills that he be punished, is that giving to someone more good than he is due, is compatible with justice because justice does not restrict mercy. But, giving to someone less good (or more evil) than he is due is not compatible with justice. Justice is asymmetrical in that respect. For this reason, punishing an innocent person, knowing that he is innocent, is unjust, whether or not the person volunteers to be punished. That is why the Protestant conception of the Father pouring out His wrath for our sins on Christ makes God the Father unjust to Christ, whereas the satisfaction conception of the atonement does not, because while justice prohibits punishing an innocent person, it does not prohibit receiving a substitutionary gift that makes reparation for the debt owed by another.

This is why St. Thomas uses the language of St. Paul in speaking of the Father “delivering up” Christ, as when St. Paul wrote,”but delivered him up for us all.” (Romans 8:32) St. Thomas writes:

Christ as God delivered Himself up to death by the same will and action as that by which the Father delivered Him up; but as man He gave Himself up by a will inspired of the Father. Consequently there is no contrariety in the Father delivering Him up and in Christ delivering Himself up. (ST III Q.47 a.3 ad 2)

God the Father did not pour out His wrath on His Son; rather, according to His plan He delivered Christ over to the Jews and Romans (i.e. permitted Christ to be arrested and flogged and crucified), and they freely poured out their wrath on Christ. There was no contrariety between the Father and the Son during the Passion, no loss of love from the Father to the Son or the Son to the Father. The Father wholly and entirely loved His Son during the entire Passion. By one and the same divine will and action, the Father allowed the Son to be crucified and the Son allowed Himself to be crucified. (SeeSumma Theologica III Q.47 a.3) (For an explanation of “My God, my God, why has Thou forsaken me?”, see comment #26 above.)

Otherwise, if the Father had wrath for men while the Son had love for men, this either (1) conflicts with the doctrine of the Trinity, in making the Father and the Son be at odds with each other [i.e. "drives a wedge"]; if Christ loves men, then so does the Father, or if the Father has wrath for men, then so does Christ, which doesn’t fit with “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do,” or (2) it conflicts with the doctrine of the incarnation, in making the Son’s divine will to be that of divine wrath directed toward His own human nature, and either (2a) the Son’s human will contradicting His divine will, by loving His human nature while the divine will hates His human nature, or (2b) the Son’s human will being in perfect conformity with the divine will, and in His enraged human will pouring out wrath on His own human nature and wanting to punish it and kill it, like Phinehas in Numbers 25:7, but toward His own flesh.

This theological mess will continue, so long as the sacrificial and substitutionary language of Scripture and the Fathers is misconstrued as meaning that Christ steps voluntarily into the blind stream of divine wrath so that we don’t receive it. We need to remember and recover the original conception of substitutionary atonement, which long preceded the Protestant Christ-takes-the-divine-wrath version.

from comment 69 Bryan (much more in this comment at the link) http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/

In at least two ways, however, we do not agree regarding what was happening between the Father and the Son during the crucifixion. First, you believe that during the crucifixion the Father was pouring out all His wrath for all the sins of the elect, on the Son. In the Reformed system, the complete punishment for each sin committed by each of the elect, was received by Christ on the cross, meted out directly by the Father. Each of those sins deserved eternal punishment in hell fire. So according to the Reformed view, on the cross Christ received from the Father a punishment equivalent to x eternal punishments in hell fire, where x is the number of all the elect multiplied by the number of all the sinful acts (thoughts, words, deeds, omissions) ever committed by all the elect. Hence, Sproul says that on the cross the Father essentially says to the Son, “God damn you.” (See comment #41.) That’s just what I mean by the Father ‘hating’ the Son, i.e. ‘disfellowshiping’ Him, breaking communion with Him. John Piper’s colleague Rick Gamache claims that during the crucifixion the Father accused the Son of committing a long list of sins. You claim that Christ offers Himself “to absorb the Father’s holy wrath on our behalf,” as though the Son offers Himself to the Father as a punching bag on whom the Father can take out all His wrath justly due to us for all our sins. This treatment of Christ is just, in your view, because the Father has imputed our sin to the Son; that’s how you interpret St. Paul’s statement in 2 Cor. 5:21 that God made Christ “to be sin.”

By contrast, in the Catholic tradition the Father loved the Son during the crucifixion, as He does eternally, and was not angry with Him, and did not think Him to be guilty of any sin, and did not turn away from Him. In the Catholic tradition the Father (and the Son and the Spirit in the one divine will) delivered over the Son in His human nature (Christ complying in His human will), into the hands of sinful men to be crucified. What the Son endured, in His human nature, was the curse for sin, which as St. Augustine explains, is suffering and death, not wrath or anger or rejection or hatred from the Father. (Again, see the link at comment #41.) God did not create man to suffer and die. Suffering and death were the result of the fall, not part of the original design. (See “Lawrence Feingold on Original Justice and Original Sin.”) And that (i.e. suffering and death) is what the Son, in His human nature, endured.

Yes, the Son, through His human nature, satisfies God’s (not just the Father’s wrath, but the Son’s and the Spirit’s as well) wrath for human sin, meriting grace for our eternal life, as I explained above, andon your site. He did this by offering Himself, in His human nature, to the Father as a sacrifice for our sin, and this act of love, in His human will, made satisfaction for our sins, by making an offering that is more pleasing to the Father than all our sins are displeasing. The meaning of 2 Cor. 5:21, as St. Augustine explains, is that Christ was made a sin offering. (See comment #35 above.) That doesn’t mean that sin was imputed to Christ, or that He became legally guilty in the eyes of the Father. It means that He, as innocent, offered Himself to the Father for our sin, as a gift more pleasing than all our sins were displeasing. The meaning of Isaiah 53, likewise, was explained in the body of the post, and in comments #17 and #19. This way of understanding the atonement makes sense of all those passages you cited (Rom 5:9, John 3:36, Rom 3:25-26, etc.). But, nowhere in Scripture does it say that God the Father poured out His wrath on His Son. You are bringing that assumption to the text of Scripture, and reading it into the passages on the atonement, and into the passages on our being saved from God’s wrath. And it is difficult for you, I think, to see the other paradigm, and see these passages through the framework of the other paradigm, because you are so used to reading the concept of “God pouring out His wrath on His Son” into these passages, rather than understanding them as the Son, in His human nature, offering to the Father a sacrifice of love that is more pleasing than all our sins are displeasing. Resolving this disagreement would take some time, so I’ll push this disagreement to the back burner as well.

(The back burner is getting crowded, I know, but we just can’t address all these questions at once; we should treat them one at a time, in their proper place. And I don’t have the time at present to treat them all.)

The second way in which we do not agree regarding what was happening between the Father and the Son during the crucifixion is that you claim that the “ancient, eternal fellowship between Father and Son was broken,” whereas in the Catholic tradition, that fellowship cannot possibly be broken, any more than God could possibly cease to exist. And this disagreement, concerning whether that ancient, eternal fellowship was broken, is the one on which I wish to focus.

I think the argument in comment #62 is solid, in that your claim entails either Arianism or polytheism. I understand that you explicitly reject both Arianism and polytheism. So, I’m not claiming that you explicitly affirm either Arianism or polytheism. But, I do think your position is incoherent, because although you explicitly deny Arianism and polytheism, your claim that the “ancient, eternal fellowship between Father and Son was broken,” entails either Arianism or polytheism. This criticism is not an external criticism that presupposes the Catholic paradigm. This problem is *internal* to the Reformed paradigm.

You think your position avoids both Arianism and polytheism, because you claim that ontologically, nothing changed between the Father and the Son during the crucifixion. Instead, you claim, what changed between the Father and the Son during the crucifixion was that the “ancient, eternal fellowship between Father and Son was broken.” And a temporary loss of that eternal fellowship, in your opinion, does not entail either Arianism or polytheism, because, you claim, during the crucifixion, all the ontology of the Father and the Son remained the same.

The problem for your position is that in order for there to be a [temporary] loss of the eternal fellowship between the Father and the Son, either Arianism or polytheism must be true. That’s because in order for there to be a breach of fellowship between the Father and the Son, the Son cannot be the Father’s own perfect self-understanding, as I explained here. If the Son is the Father’s perfect self-understanding, the Father’s perfect Concept of Himself, the one perfect internal Word of the Father, then necessarily the Father cannot ever lose fellowship with the Son, because the Father cannot lose perfect communion with His own self-understanding, His own Concept of Himself, His own internal Word. (On the Son as the internal Word of the Father, see St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica I Q.27 – Q. 35.) For this reason, only if the Son is not the Father’s self-understanding, the Father’s perfect Concept of Himself, the internal Word of the Father, can there be a loss of the eternal fellowship between the Father and the Son. But if the Son is not the Father’s self-understanding, perfect Concept, and internal Word, then the Son is extrinsic to the Father. That’s the only other option. The Son can be internal to the Father only as Logos; the only other way to be internal to the Father is as the Spirit is internal to the Father (i.e. is the relation between the Father and the Father’s Logos). (Hence your claim that the ancient, eternal fellowship between the Father and the Son was broken would entail that the Spirit ceased to exist, since the Spirit is the fellowship of the Father and the Son.)

This is why the claim that there was a [temporary] loss of the eternal fellowship between the Father and the Son entails that the relation of the Logos to the Father is something *extrinsic* to the Father. And the Son can be extrinsic to the Father only if the Son either (a) has His being independently of the Father (in which case polytheism is true), or (b) was created by the Father (in which case Arianism is true). Your claim (that the ancient, eternal fellowship between the Father and the Son was broken) is based on a three-headed organism conception of the Trinity [as the mythic Cerberus], as though one head could turn away from the other. The problem with the three-headed organism conception of the Trinity is that because God is immaterial, and therefore the heads cannot be differentiated by being composed of different chunks of matter, nothing would differentiate the three heads from each other, unless they did not share the same nature. But the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit all are one and the same divine nature. So there must be processions, in order to differentiate the three Persons from each other. And the processions cannot be external, for then the Son and the Spirit wouldn’t be consubstantial with the Father. Hence, the processions must be internal to the Father, and so the Apostle John teaches that the Logos is in the bosom of the Father (John 1:18), and St. Paul teaches that the Spirit searches the “depths of God” (1 Cor. 2:10), which the Spirit can do because the Spirit is internal to the Father."

.....................from comment 3 here: http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/04/aquinas-and-trent-part-6/
This is why Aquinas says that God the Father delivered up [tradiderit] i.e. handed over, Christ to the Passion. (ST III Q.47 a.3) That is a very different depiction of the Father’s role from that in which God the Father is pouring out His own wrath on Christ.

see also https://archive.org/stream/thedoctrineofato02riviuoft#page/n261/mode/2up/search/conclusion