“For God is good—or rather, of all goodness He is Fountainhead, and it is impossible for one who is good to be mean or grudging about anything.”
St. Athanasius ‘’On the Incarnation’’
Hello my siblings in Christ, I’m Bojan, and today is the third birthday of this channel. Yay, happy birthday Bible Illustrated YouTube channel. in this long overdue video we will talk about penal substitution. Before we begin with this video, I highly suggest you watch my video “Why Doesn’t God Just Forgive?”, where I give an explanation why Christ had to come in flesh in order to save us, as opposed to simply forgiving us our sins. That video complements this video, and this video complements that video.
In that video, I called Penal Substitution in heresy. Here I should emphasize that it is not a condemned heresy. I called it heresy just to be cheeky, which is a very bad criterion for something to be heretical. If you’re happy with penal substitution and it helps your life in Christ, feel free to subscribe to it. However, please be aware that a lot of people do have great issues with it, issues that I consider more than justified, and that it prevents people form seeing God as the loving Father.
Okay, first, what I mean by penal substitution? According to how this teaching is most often presented, God is holy and just, and in order to be holy and just, He demands punishment for sin, He demands satisfaction for His justice. Since us humans sin against God, we infinitely offend Him and nothing we do can every satisfy His demand for justice. However, Christ dies on the cross for us, and He suffers the punishment we were supposed to receive, and because Christ is God, His sacrifice is of infinite value, and therefore God’s demand for justice is finally satisfied.
I call penal substitution the quick-witted theologian’s answer to an uninquisitive inquirer.
“Why did Christ have to die?”
“Er, because you need to be punished for your sins, and Christ gets punished instead of you?”
“Oh okay.”
Now, there are a couple of such quick answers to complex theological issues. Christ gets punished instead of you, good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell, Trinity is like a brick whose leaves are liquid, gas and sunshine and so on. These sorts of explanations are like asking why did a mermaid’s underwater home burn down, and getting an answer that it burned down due to an unattended cigar - if it works, it’s fine, but the explanation given tends to require more explanations, each more faulty and misguided than the one before.
But, for great many deal of people, these sorts of explanations work perfectly well. They may not be true beyond the most superficial level, but if surface level is satisfied, I suppose you can tick a box next to it and move on to something else. Some people do not move on to something else, and that is where penal substitution begins to implode, and either it has to go or most basic of Christian teachings have to go.
A caveat: I don’t mean to imply that being easily satisfied by a superficial solution implies stupidity. Different people have different interests. Maybe theology simply isn’t your thing, or maybe this branch of theology isn’t your thing.
And that is precisely the major issue with penal substitution: it is very easy to explain. If you use penal substitution, you don’t have to use the ransom theory or, God forbid, Christus Victor. Why bother with the complicated issues of transcendent God taking upon our human nature in order to make us participants of His divine nature, when you can easily explain redemption with a heavenly transaction? You don’t get your hands messy. It is like a punctual village surgeon that never went to med school - he’s clean, he’s fast fast, efficient, saves lives and leaves corpses in his wake. It’s less than ideal, it’s better than having no surgeon at all, but having a trained professional is better than having a village apprentice.
What I find worrisome about the penal substitution is that there are people who call it Gospel itself, that is, that Christ taking upon Himself our punishment is what Gospel is all about. I disagree - I find this approach very reductionist at best and problematic at worst. The Orthodox Christian teaching on theosis has been mostly absent from Western Christianity. Theosis is a transformative process whose aim is our union with God though participation in His divine nature via His uncreated energies, and it is this teaching that is the most important check and balance for penal substitution - it either prevents it from becoming the dominant model or the most important aspect of the redemption, or it makes penal substitution completely redundant. I am of the opinion that it makes it redundant. We die because our sin has cut off our participation in that divine nature which is the life itself, not because God must punish us with death for something that absolutely majority of us simply did not do.
As a side note, you may claim that theosis is some weird crypto-Hindu teaching that crept into Christianity. It is anything but, and for that I only have to quote the Epistle of St. Peter, who says: “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire.” See what great words the Apostle uses! Partakers of the divine nature! Our salvation is not a simple verdict for being good - our salvation is to be unified with God in most intimate way without dissolving our very being and personality!
The issues of penal substitution depend primarily have you see the mortality of Adam and Eve. Is this punishment retributive, that is, does God take away their chance of immortality as a way of causing pain and misery due to their sin, or is the mortality of Adam and Eve a natural consequence of their disobedience to the Very Giver of Life? Notice that in Genesis God says that, upon the day when Adam shall taste the fruit of tree of knowledge of good and evil, He says that ‘you will die,’ not ‘I will kill you,’ clearly indicating that our mortality is primarily a consequence of our sin, not intentionally inflicted by God on us. The distinction may seem like a minor one, but if we see Adam and Eve’s mortality as a retributive penalty as opposed to consequence, then we cannot comprehend why their children die as well. Our mortality and our sinful nature are primarily a disease that spread from our foreparents to us. That is why we die and that is why our children die. Otherwise, if the punishment was retributive, we couldn’t explain why our children die as well. They did not sin with the sin of Adam and Eve.
I would also like to comment on the justice of God for a second. Whenever God does something in the Scripture that gets His hands messy, anything that would make an atheist YouTuber’s heyday in some 7000 years, He always does that with the goal of preventing further spread of sin and and corruption. That is the case with the Flood, with Sodom and Gomorrah, and Ananias and Sephoras. God does not inflict punishment in order to cause pain or misery; He does it to bring people to repentance or, at the very worst, to contain the sin that has become especially heinous. Remember that, according to the Scriptures, according to the Epistle of St. Peter, God did redeem those souls that perished in Flood, even despite their initial disobedience. Writings of St. John Chrysostom are simply filled with similar comments, and the following passages are quite telling:
“For if the wrath of God were a passion, one might well despair as being unable to quench the flame which he [a wicked man] had kindled by so many evil doings; but since the Divine nature is passionless, even if He punishes, even if He takes vengeance, He does this not with wrath, but with tender care, and much loving-kindness; wherefore it behooves us to be of much good courage, and to trust in the power of repentance.
For even those who have sinned against Him He is not wont to visit with punishment for His own sake; for no harm can traverse that Divine nature; but He acts with a view to our advantage, and to prevent our perverseness becoming worse by our making a practice of despising and neglecting Him. For even as one who places himself outside the light inflicts no loss on the light, but the greatest upon himself being shut up in darkness; even so he who has become accustomed to despise that almighty power, does no injury to the power, but inflicts the greatest possible injury upon himself.
And for this reason God threatens us with punishments, and often inflicts them, not as avenging Himself, but by way of attracting us to Himself. For a physician also is not distressed or vexed at the insults of those who are out of their minds, but yet does and contrives everything for the purpose of stopping those who do such unseemly acts, not looking to his own interests but to their profit; and if they manifest some small degree of self-control and sobriety he rejoices and is glad, and applies his remedies much more earnestly, not as revenging himself upon them for their former conduct, but as wishing to increase their advantage, and to bring them back to a purely sound state of health.
Even so God when we fall into the very extremity of madness, says and does everything, not by way of avenging Himself on account of our former deeds; but because He wishes to release us from our disorder; and by means of right reason it is quite possible to be convinced of this.”
So says St. John Chrysostom.
The biggest issue I have is how people generally pit God’s mercy and God’s justice against each other in the context of penal substitution. God would like to have mercy, but sadly, He has to be just. People forget that the Scripture says us that God is love. It never says God is justice, never, ever. It calls Him just, but not on the same level as calling Him love. God’s justice is simply a different manifestation of His love for us, not the evil twin of God’s mercy. Speaking of this insane duality that some people saw in God, St. Isaac of Syria says: “God is so loving that He is unjust.”
I also have to point out a glaring inconsistency in penal substitution. According to the teaching, Christ dies and He takes upon Himself penalty for our sins. Now, that would be fine… if Christ stayed dead. But He does not. The Resurrection of Christ is, in my opinion, a major flaw in the whole concept. If God is infinitely offended by our transgression, and requires a sacrifice of an infinite value, that sacrifice would have to remain dead. What penalty does Christ suffer, exactly? Is it death? It lasted only three days. Is it spiritual death? God incarnate cannot suffer spiritual death. Jesus Christ does not come to Hades, Sheol, the abode of the dead, as a condemned criminal, He descends there like a conqueror with the intent to raid the entire place and leave the devil empty handed. We and the souls of the dead are His spoils.
However, in Christus victor model, things are far more consistent. God takes upon Himself our fallen mortal nature. We killed Christ. We would have killed Him even if He spent his days in peace, for He would have died of old age, all for bearing that mortal body. His decision to die upon the Cross specifically was to show at what lengths God Himself would go for his sheep that have wandered astray. Our humanity drags Him to death - we do that to Him. Resurrection of Christ is what He does for us - His divinity, and His divine body, pulls us out of our common grave. In that regard we understand the parable of the Suffering Servant, who suffers due to our fallen nature in order to glorify us all by having both our human nature and His divine nature.
Orthodox hymnology and writings of saints are a source of doctrine in the Eastern Orthodox Church. They help us see what Christians of old believed. If you take the Bible as the sole source of teaching, you will never be able to tell what’s literal, what’s symbolic and what’s poetic in the Scriptures. Orthodox hymns of the Great and Holy Friday are extremely powerful, and they lament at God being slain by His own creation, that very God who showered us with such mercies, that He even took upon Himself our own flesh. The imagery of an angry God being appeased by His own death is practically absent.
Now, there are some who will say that, just because I dismiss the most dominant model of penal substitution, I deny that Christ died for our sins, that God does not punish people and that hell cannot be real if there is no punishment. First, yes, Christ died for our sins, He died for us, redemption is real, but not to be punished instead of us. Those are two different things. Second, I already defined what punishment is, and sin is punishment in itself. God need not punish per se; sin is what we do to ourselves. God only acts to prevent or punish sin in His loving providence, and especially to prevent an abysmal catastrophes. As for hell, that is a subject for an another video, but hell is still real and very eternal. Those who do not partake of God’s own nature won’t be able to endure Him, and their inability to endure the Most Holy Trinity in eternity will be hell.
I would like to thank everyone who has stayed so far and watched this video. Please remember to comment, share, subscribe… If you have an opposing opinion, feel free to share it and so on. This video was intended to be much longer, but because this channel does not make deep dives, this is what it is. I do hope to make further videos based on St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation, and especially why Christ had to come in flesh, why did He have to die. This video is primarily a dismantling of the Western idea of of penal substitution. There are many atheists out there who would not have been atheists if there was not penal substitution. We have to bear that in mind. These people are not fleeing personal responsibility. Maybe some of them are. But these people are fleeing an angry Father, God Who is not Father, but more akin to Annas and Caiaphas, Who is out to get Christ’s Blood.
