see also :http://catholicdefense.blogspot.com/2013/03/how-does-good-friday-work-exactly.html
see also http://catholicnick.blogspot.com/2014/04/does-catholic-view-of-christs-atonement.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NicksCatholicBlog+%28NICK%27S+CATHOLIC+BLOG%29
from comment 16 here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/04/aquinas-and-trent-part-6/#comment-46122
And no, the Reformers did not teach the quirky, modern, evangelical Protestant penal substitution view you are advocating. Listen to Calvin when commenting on Jesus’ use of the words from Psalm 22 on the cross: “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? How could Christ by his intercession appease the Father toward others, if he were himself hateful to God? (Institutes, 2.16.11) Calvin did not hold the awful view that you find “Reformed” preachers and even evangelical theologians advocating today.
from comment 140 here http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/
What people fail to grasp is that Christ does not bear the punishment due to sin in the same manner that sinners do in this life, and will do eternally in hell. Christ bore the punishment due to sin as an act of sacrifice and obedience to the Father’s will. It is not the receiving of God’s wrath that makes the atonement satisfactory (as a substitute punishment), rather it is the Son’s offering up the gift of his blood (his life) on the altar of the cross that atones for human transgression. He suffers in our place as the act of an obedient servant, not as the recipient of wrath from an angry deity. It is not the punishment itself that satisfies divine wrath, but Christ’s humility, obedience, and sacrificial compliance with God’s will that his blood be poured out on the altar of the cross.
The modern evangelical model of penal substitution (not exactly the same as the view of Calvin by the way) severs the link between the incarnation and the cross. The humility and suffering of the Son on our behalf does not begin on the cross, but encompasses his whole incarnate experience. It begins with Jesus’ birth and culminates with his sacrifice at Calvary. It is all of one piece; his unspeakable condescension in setting aside his heavenly glory and becoming one with his fallen creation.
Catholic :https://sites.google.com/site/catholicdefense/ji-packers-penal-substitution-article
The above deals with arguments against J I Packer's view
The ones below give Catholic side in a debate and the Protestant side is given below too:
More on Penal substitution from Cathilic view
MORE ON PENAL SUBSTITUTION INCLUDING A TRACING OF THE HISTORY OF THE DOCTRINE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_substitution
A look at hints of Penal Sub. in the church Fathers. However, to me, these quotes seem more likely to indicate that he bore the curse of death for us, and not what the Reformed say as being punished---but perhaps they are one and the same? Not sure:
http://www.puritanboard.com/f15/2-questions-emailed-me-9928/
http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/ from comment 17:
http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/ from comment 17:
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 on the same thread:
Let me add something as a point of clarification and qualification. To be damned is to be without hope, and without charity. It is to know that one is eternally separated from God, with no hope, not even the possibility of there being hope. That is utter despair. To be damned is to hate God, and to hate His justice. To be damned is to hate oneself with never-ending hatred that knows itself to be never-ending. But Christ endured the cross for the joy set before Him; He always retained hope and charity. He did not despair (that would have been a mortal sin). Nor did He hate God. Thus He never hated Himself. Nor did He ever lose sanctifying grace; otherwise His human will would have been against His divine will. So, for these reasons, if we say that He experienced what it is like to be damned, we must include some very important qualifications. He experienced the external loss of divine protection, and the interior loss of spiritual consolation. The damned also experience that, so in those two respects Christ experienced what it is like to be damned. But Christ didn’t experience the despair, self-loathing, hatred for God and deprivation of grace that the damned experience. So in those respects Christ didn’t experience what it is like to be damned.
quote below from: http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/the-harrowing-of-hell/#comment-7760 from comment 4
Let me add something as a point of clarification and qualification. To be damned is to be without hope, and without charity. It is to know that one is eternally separated from God, with no hope, not even the possibility of there being hope. That is utter despair. To be damned is to hate God, and to hate His justice. To be damned is to hate oneself with never-ending hatred that knows itself to be never-ending. But Christ endured the cross for the joy set before Him; He always retained hope and charity. He did not despair (that would have been a mortal sin). Nor did He hate God. Thus He never hated Himself. Nor did He ever lose sanctifying grace; otherwise His human will would have been against His divine will. So, for these reasons, if we say that He experienced what it is like to be damned, we must include some very important qualifications. He experienced the external loss of divine protection, and the interior loss of spiritual consolation. The damned also experience that, so in those two respects Christ experienced what it is like to be damned. But Christ didn’t experience the despair, self-loathing, hatred for God and deprivation of grace that the damned experience. So in those respects Christ didn’t experience what it is like to be damned.
quote below from: http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/the-harrowing-of-hell/#comment-7760 from comment 4
If Christ lost the Beatific Vision during His three hours on the cross, then He did not consciously die for your sins and mine, but only for sins in the abstract, because by the natural power of His human intellect He could not have known all at once all the persons of the world and all our sins. Nor could He therefore have suffered for all our sins, interiorly. Only if He knew all our sins particularly and individually, could He grieve with the pain of contrition in solidarity with us, for each of our sins. And therefore only if He retained the Beatific Vision could He make atonement for each of our sins by His internal suffering. In the year 2000 Pope John Paul II wrote of this in his Apostolic Letter Novo millennio ineunte:
26. Jesus’ cry on the Cross, dear Brothers and Sisters, is not the cry of anguish of a man without hope, but the prayer of the Son who offers his life to the Father in love, for the salvation of all. At the very moment when he identifies with our sin, “abandoned” by the Father, he “abandons” himself into the hands of the Father. His eyes remain fixed on the Father. Precisely because of the knowledge and experience of the Father which he alone has, even at this moment of darkness he sees clearly the gravity of sin and suffers because of it. He alone, who sees the Father and rejoices fully in him, can understand completely what it means to resist the Father’s love by sin. More than an experience of physical pain, his Passion is an agonizing suffering of the soul. Theological tradition has not failed to ask how Jesus could possibly experience at one and the same time his profound unity with the Father, by its very nature a source of joy and happiness, and an agony that goes all the way to his final cry of abandonment. The simultaneous presence of these two seemingly irreconcilable aspects is rooted in the fathomless depths of the hypostatic union. (emphasis mine)
Pope John Paul II teaches here that it was precisely because Christ retained the Beatific Vision that He could (and did) see the full gravity of all human sins and therefore suffer for all of them in all of their offensiveness to God whom we should love above all things. How could He suffer more than anyone has ever suffered, while at the same time holding on to the joy of the Beatific Vision? Pope John Paul II says that this is a mystery, and thus we should not try to explain it away by eliminating either Christ’s Beatific Vision or His suffering. Pope John Paul II goes on in the next paragraph to say:
27. Faced with this mystery, we are greatly helped not only by theological investigation but also by that great heritage which is the “lived theology” of the saints. The saints offer us precious insights which enable us to understand more easily the intuition of faith, thanks to the special enlightenment which some of them have received from the Holy Spirit, or even through their personal experience of those terrible states of trial which the mystical tradition describes as the “dark night”. Not infrequently the saints have undergone something akin to Jesus’ experience on the Cross in the paradoxical blending of bliss and pain. In the Dialogue of Divine Providence, God the Father shows Catherine of Siena how joy and suffering can be present together in holy souls: “Thus the soul is blissful and afflicted: afflicted on account of the sins of its neighbour, blissful on account of the union and the affection of charity which it has inwardly received. These souls imitate the spotless Lamb, my Only-begotten Son, who on the Cross was both blissful and afflicted”. In the same way, Thérèse of Lisieux lived her agony in communion with the agony of Jesus, “experiencing” in herself the very paradox of Jesus’s own bliss and anguish: “In the Garden of Olives our Lord was blessed with all the joys of the Trinity, yet his dying was no less harsh. It is a mystery, but I assure you that, on the basis of what I myself am feeling, I can understand something of it”. What an illuminating testimony! Moreover, the accounts given by the Evangelists themselves provide a basis for this intuition on the part of the Church of Christ’s consciousness when they record that, even in the depths of his pain, he died imploring forgiveness for his executioners (cf. Lk 23:34) and expressing to the Father his ultimate filial abandonment: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Lk 23:46).
Here he points out how the great saints have a taste of this mystery in their own lives, in that they simultaneously in different but interrelated respects experience the joy of hope and charity to be fulfilled in the life to come, and the suffering and pain caused by the sins of one’s neighbor (and even of oneself) and by all the present woes due to the not-yet-ness of the culmination of all things in Heaven. On the cross Jesus in His human intellect didn’t lose sight of the loving face of His Father, but simultaneously He experienced in His body and soul the full measure of the desolation, disorder, madness and suffering of this world under the curse of sin. That’s what He is expressing in His “Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani?, His full and total immersion into the God-forsakeness of this fallen world of fallen man in its cursed condition in this present life. This is what it means that He bore the curse, namely, that He entered into the fallenness of this world, even unto death.
UPDATE: One of the best refutations I’ve seen online, of Balthasar’s claim that Christ did not have the beatific vision, is Unam Sanctum Catholicam‘s “Balthasar, Christ and the Beatific Vision.”
from comment 111 found here: http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/ below:
and here http://catholicdefense.blogspot.com/2013/03/how-does-good-friday-work-exactly.html from the comment section
A) that we are sinners B) in need of protecting from C) the Father's wrath is not in dispute.
Are we protected because D)Christ jumped in front of that wrath like a Secret Service agent or are we protected because E) Christ made a way for the Father to extend us His unwarranted love and mercy?
and here comment 3 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/04/aquinas-and-trent-part-6/
The dilemma is between the Father knowingly pouring out His wrath on His innocent Son, or knowingly pouring out His wrath on His guilty Son. The option of the Father knowingly pouring out His wrath on His innocent Son who loves us and wants to stand in our place, does not split the horns, but is a more specific case under the first horn of the dilemma. If the Father poured out His wrath on His innocent Son, knowing that His Son was innocent, then the Father would be unjust, whether or not the Son out of love wanted to take our place. The Son’s love for man does not change the fact that it is unjust to punish an innocent person knowing that he is innocent. The Father can receive a gift of satisfaction from Christ, without being unjust. But to punish the innocent Christ, knowing that He is innocent, would be unjust.
from comment of the same link:
http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/
from comment 111 found here: http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/ below:
You’re using the term “PSub,” meaning “penal substitutionary atonement,” but it is very important to be aware that the term “penal substitution” has a different meaning in Catholic theology than it does in Reformed theology. At the beginning of the article at the top of this page, you will see a link to a video by R.C. Sproul explaining the Reformed conception of penal substitution. If you watch it to the end, you will see that according to Sproul the Father essentially says to the Son, “God damn You.” According to that conception of penal substitution, bearing the curse means bearing the full punishment under justice for every sin committed by the elect. But that’s not what the term ‘penal substitution’ means in Catholic theology. In Catholic theology, ‘penal substitution’ means that Christ endured the curse of physical death (which was the curse God imposed on man after Adam’s sin) for our sakes, and offered Himself in a perfect sacrifice of loving obedience, in our place as our High Priest and Victim. That is also how the Orthodox and the Church Fathers understand the curse; see, for example, the letter of St. Augustine to Faustus, linked in the article above. It is a completely different conception of ‘penal substitution.’ So it would be equivocation to use the term ‘penal substitution’ as if in Catholic theology it meant the same as it does in Reformed theology. (Hence the statement by Fr. Murray is not about the Reformed conception of penal substitution, or indicate that there is dogmatic ‘space’ with the Catholic Tradition for the Reformed conception of penal substitution.)
It is true that in the Church Fathers there are distinct explanations of what was taking place on the Cross, but penal substitution (in the Reformed sense) was not among them, and is incompatible with the satisfaction account provided in the Catechism, and with Catholic soteriology considered as a whole. The doctrine taught by the magisterium is laid out not only in the Catechism but also in the Tradition taught and developed in both of the first two millennia. See, for example, the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas on this subject, in “Aquinas and Trent: Part 6.”
from comment 62:
Part of the reason for this error is the mistaken notion of the atonement, described in the post above, in which the Father has to pour out wrath on His Son. That notion of the atonement forces the following dilemma: either the Father pours out His wrath only on a human nature, in which case, the suffering isn’t infinite in value and therefore isn’t redemptive, or the Father pours out His wrath on the Logos, which entails tritheism or Arianism for the reasons just explained.
from article http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/10/a-reply-from-a-romery-person/ below:
In Catholic theology, on the cross Christ in His human nature bore the curse of death, and by His obedience in His human nature, He offered Himself to the Father as a sacrificial gift of love. In this way He gave to the Father something far more pleasing than all our sins were displeasing to the Father. In this way He in His human nature merited from the Father the gift of grace for all men. This is how our debt was paid, not by Christ bearing the wrath of the Father, but by offering Himself up in love to His Father and so meriting for us the gift of grace. We need grace to enter heaven because heaven is a supernatural end. We cannot attain a supernatural end by our own nature because a thing can act only in proportion to its own nature. But through His Passion Christ merited for all men the gift of grace, i.e. the gift of participation in the divine nature. And Christ established means by which we receive this grace; these means are the sacraments. Through baptism we are reborn, that is, we receive sanctifying grace, i.e. the life of God, participation in the divine nature. And through the Eucharist we grow in sanctifying grace, and in agapefrom comment 62:
Part of the reason for this error is the mistaken notion of the atonement, described in the post above, in which the Father has to pour out wrath on His Son. That notion of the atonement forces the following dilemma: either the Father pours out His wrath only on a human nature, in which case, the suffering isn’t infinite in value and therefore isn’t redemptive, or the Father pours out His wrath on the Logos, which entails tritheism or Arianism for the reasons just explained.
from article http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/10/a-reply-from-a-romery-person/ below:
and here http://catholicdefense.blogspot.com/2013/03/how-does-good-friday-work-exactly.html from the comment section
A) that we are sinners B) in need of protecting from C) the Father's wrath is not in dispute.
Are we protected because D)Christ jumped in front of that wrath like a Secret Service agent or are we protected because E) Christ made a way for the Father to extend us His unwarranted love and mercy?
and here comment 3 http://www.calledtocommunion.com/2009/04/aquinas-and-trent-part-6/
The dilemma is between the Father knowingly pouring out His wrath on His innocent Son, or knowingly pouring out His wrath on His guilty Son. The option of the Father knowingly pouring out His wrath on His innocent Son who loves us and wants to stand in our place, does not split the horns, but is a more specific case under the first horn of the dilemma. If the Father poured out His wrath on His innocent Son, knowing that His Son was innocent, then the Father would be unjust, whether or not the Son out of love wanted to take our place. The Son’s love for man does not change the fact that it is unjust to punish an innocent person knowing that he is innocent. The Father can receive a gift of satisfaction from Christ, without being unjust. But to punish the innocent Christ, knowing that He is innocent, would be unjust.
from comment of the same link:
Why is it unjust to give someone something they requested?
We have to distinguish between will and nature. Just because someone requests something (with his will), does not mean that it is just to give it to him (given his nature). Whether or not it is just to give it to him depends upon what he asks for, and his nature. Socrates gives the example of a man from whom you have borrowed a knife. Normally, it is just to give back to someone what you have borrowed from that person. But this knife-owner comes to your front-door in a raging fury, say, having just caught his wife in an act of adultery, and demanding back his knife. Should you give it to him? No, not at that moment. Why? Because of his emotional state. It would be unjust to give him back his knife at that moment. So according to his will (i.e. his request) it might seem you should give it back to him, but given his state, you should definitely not give it to him. A person can request something that you should not give to him. All sorts of sexual examples come to mind. Anyone who thinks that a request is sufficient to make fulfilling that request just, should not walk through a red light district. Consent does not entail a moral green light, because consent is not sufficient. The notion that consent is sufficient is a kind of Kantianism that prescinds from the natures of the persons involved, and from the order of Divine justice.
First, from the perspective of the parent it isn’t unjust to him because he requested it.
That’s Kantianism. When Saul asked his armor bearer to kill him, the armor bearer rightly refused. (1 Sam 31:4) It would have been unjust for the armor bearer to kill Saul, even though Saul was requesting it. (You can think of other ‘assisted suicide’ cases.) We have to distinguish between will and nature, and the role each plays in the morality of an action.
To punish an innocent person, knowing that he is innocent, is unjust, whether or not the person *wills* that he be punished. 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. And what he is due is not based only on what he requests. Therefore, punishing an innocent person, knowing that he is innocent, is unjust, whether or not the person *wills* that he be punished.
A parent could justly be punished for a child’s crimes only insofar as the parent was responsible for the child’s evil behavior. With regard to punishment, justice doesn’t merely demand that *someone* be punished, but that the guilty person be punished. Otherwise justice is blind not merely in the proper sense of being impartial, but in the sense of treating humanity as an indefinite amorphous mass deserving some magnitude of blind fury. But on the Day of Judgment, what is presented is not the total debt due for all men’s sins. Rather, the Just Judge judges according to each man’s works. In other words, justice ‘sees’ each man, and what he deserves. Justice does not vent wrath blindly, as though anyone could jump in to block the blind stream of wrath.
below from comment 214 herehttp://www.calledtocommunion.com/2010/04/catholic-and-reformed-conceptions-of-the-atonement/
You wrote:
What does the Holy Father mean by the following statements?
“That God in Christ took on our sins and He BECAME the sinner for us.”And more importantly,“And my sins are there in His body, in His soul!”
He means not that Christ sinned or that our sins were imputed to Christ, but that Christ took on our sins in solidarity with us, as explained both in the post above, and in comment #157 above.
Is it not metaphysically impossible for our sins to be IN Christ’s soul, or am I not understanding this discussion?
There are two ways to be “in”. One is to be in the will, as a disorder. Sin was not in Christ in that way. But another way is to be in the intellect, as that known through union with God and man, and through direct experience of it being done to him, and then grieved in the will, on account of what is in the intellect. In that sense sin was in Christ.
Also, I notice very little discussion about the propitiatory value of The atonement. … Trent makes clear that Christ’s loving sacrifice appeased or turned away the Father’s wrath. However one believes the immutability of God eliminates the possibility of emotions or passions in God, the council pretty unequivocally ascribes the personal attributes of the Father with regard to Christ’s work on the cross.
Trent, Session 22, Chap. 2: “For, appeased by this sacrifice, The Lord grants the grace and gift of penitence and pardons even the gravest crimes and sins.”OrCatechism of the Coucil of Trent: “And as no sacrifice more pleasing and acceptable could have been offered to God, He reconciled us to the Father, appeased His wrath, and made Him favorable to us.”
Right, but the appeasement is not a change in God, but a change in man’s relation to God through what Christ in our human nature has offered to God on our behalf.
The latter statement from the Roman Catechism especially seems to contradict the idea that God’s immutability precludes real anger in God.
No, there’s no contradiction. It simply has to be understood correctly, in the way I just explained above.
However we want to understand it, and as mysterious as it may be, it seems necessary to maintain that divine anger is an attribute of an immutable God. This appeasing of a very personal God was accomplished through Christ’s loving sacrifice which offered to the Father a gift more pleasing than all of mankind’s sins were displeasing. Christ turned away, soothed, or appeased the Father’s wrath, He didn’t endure it.
Right, I agree, but this doesn’t mean that there was a change in God. It means rather, as I mentioned above, that we (mankind) stand in a different relation to God, through the great act of self-sacrificial love for God by Christ in our human nature on our behalf.
In the peace of Christ,
- Bryan
also comment 220
from comment 250also comment 220
Under a legal system in which legal status is by a stipulation that is not required to correspond to the truth concerning the heart (as an innocent man can be declared guilty, and a guilty man be declared innocent), and the debt in question is extrinsic to the person (e.g. a debt of money, car, house, property, etc.) a debt can be transferred by legal stipulation. But when the debt is to God, who is Truth, and the human relatum of the debt is based on what is intrinsic to the soul, then although the debt can be forgiven by God’s choice (because it is owed to Him), it cannot be transferred to some other person, because the debt is a truth-relation based on what is intrinsic to the soul’s actions in relation to God, not a free-floating label to pinned on anyone apart from the truth concerning that person’s actions in relation to God.
Regarding 2 Cor 5:21, the traditional understanding of this passage is explained by St. Augustine – seecomment #29 in the “Does the Bible Teach Sola Fide?” thread.
In the peace of Christ,
1. On your view, why is it metaphysically possible for Saul to persecute Jesus by persecuting Christians?2. On your view, why is it metaphysically impossible for God to punish the sins of Christians by punishing Jesus?
That’s a good question, and helps clarify the distinction. In the incarnation Christ took on our nature, i.e. human nature. Through recapitulating His humanity, we are granted a share in His divinity. Hence in baptism we were made partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4). We receive Christ’s Spirit from Christ our Head, and thereby share the same supernatural life. The Church is made from the sacraments (represented by water and blood) which flow from the side of the pierced Christ, as Eve was made from the rib of Adam, and the two became one flesh, through a mystical union that does not obliterate our distinct identities, but elevates us into one divine life that is our animating principle ordered to one divine end. In this way, we are members of Christ’s Mystical Body, and therefore in this sense what is done to us is thereby done to Him.
But the disorder of sin is in the will (as explained in comments #161 – #218 above), and the punishment of sin is against the disorder in the will. In neither the incarnation nor baptism is there a ‘swapping’ of wills. Christ, in taking on human nature, takes on a human will, but it is not someone else’s will that He takes on; it is His human will, by which He chooses, and by which He remained sinless in His human life. Nor does He take on more than one human will. So in the incarnation He does not receive a guilty will, nor does He ever sin. And therefore He cannot be justly punished by God for sins we have committed, since these sins are not in His will, as explained in #161 – #218 above, just as a husband cannot be justly punished by God for the sins of his wife. The union of Christ and His Church does not dissolve our distinct identities, or fuse us all into one physical person with one will. Our distinct personhood (and thus our distinct will) remains intact, even while we are united ontologically in the ways described just above.
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