It been suggested that I should read J.I. Packer’s What did the Cross Achieve? The logic of penal substitution (1974) from The J. I. Packer Collection, Selected & Introduced by Alister McGrath. Anyway I thought people might find the introduction interesting.
I don’t feel compelled to read any further!
Added to that, yesterday I read Rob Bell’s section in Love Wins on the cross, and that reminded me that the cross isn’t only explained in the NT as “Penal Substitutionary Atonement”.
As you can imagine I am the proud owner of Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution (amzn.to/moSnpn). You may borrow it if you wish.
Can I say I hope so? 
I’d read something recently by Boyd explaining the substitution of the cross in terms which he said he agreed with. Can’t say as I understood it exactly. The way many understand it, that God needed to take out his wrath on Jesus in order to forgive us just, in my mind, is illogical.
That previous comment was from me, Amy. Didn’t realize I was logged on as Gene. 
I’ve just completed my own book. It’s called “Rediscovering the Absurdity of Penal Substitution.” It’s a very short book, and I publish it here. 
But wasn’t Jesus both human and divine?
More to the point, Christ was One with the Father.
The pain Christ experienced in space and time revealed the pain the Father endures in eternity. Sin hurts God because it hurts us, and we are loved by God. Christ is God’s face, God’s tears, God’s torn flesh and pooling blood.
Christ, taking upon himself the sins of the world in space and time, reveals his Father. God has taken upon himself the sins of the world from the beginning.
Christ, forgiving us, reveals the forgiveness of God.
Most wonderfully of all, Christ reveals the wrath of God, his judgment, his last word on sin. Christ descended into the depths. In white-hot judgment, the Son of God, our true King, destroyed the power of sin and death, both forever and for us. This is the meaning of the Resurrection.
I think God is like this:
Buck Rogers goes for his ray gun. Too slow!
Ten steps away, a huge green alien lets fly with his vortex bazooka. A purple blast flashes past Buck’s head. A sibilant fizz of singing hair…
A scream! Right behind! Buck spins round. A Venus man-trap slowly topples to the ground, hissing steam.
The green alien holsters his bazooka. “Think me ugly if you must,” he says, “but trust me Buck, I gotcha covered.”
Allan - that’s beautifully/clearly expressed. Well put - that’s helped me a lot. Personally I really don’t want to be intolerant of fellow Christians who believe in penal substitution (and for me it all depends on how they believe in it, and what accent they put on the various parts of it that makes me feel comfortable or uncomfortable about them). But here you express the sort of doctrine of atonement that makes loving sense to me - although I could never have expressed it as clearly as you have.
I’m no theologian but one thing I do understand is that you’ve expressed the atonement in a way that does not stray into dividing the Persons of the Trinity from each other. Good stuff!
All the best
Dick
I hope so. I respect those of you who believe PS, but to me, this view of atonement is positively toxic.
I once argued with some guy who tried to prove to me that PS was true because of Proverbs 17:15 -
15 He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the LORD.
Err…
I couldn’t stop laughing.
Proverbs 17:26 doesn’t help -
26 To impose a fine on a righteous man is not good, nor to strike the noble for their uprightness.
Hi Bird of the Egg -
What I meant about ‘accent’ and ‘emphasis’ regarding PS is that, in my experience, some people hold to a substitution view of atonement with the spin that it is somehow God’s way of outwitting the demands of God’s justice. In their imaginations its functions almost like the ransom theory of atonement - although God pays the Ransom to God’s Self rather than to the Satan. It’s not the best theology - but it is well meant after a clumsy fashion. Also, for some Arminian believers, PS can reinforce a sense of human solidarity - for each man/woman is a brother/sister for whom Christ died. Apart from that - I’d agree it’s all pretty grim.
As for the quotations from Proverbs - that’s hilarious: lol: Proof texting is a poor and silly gospel. I’ve made a similar point about the ‘eye for an eye’ law over on the ‘Wrath’ thread. We see eye to eye on this (as it were).
All the best
Dick
Well, I don’t believe it any more. Actually, I’m not sure I ever did believe that. I never thought it made a lot of sense.
I’d agree - it really doesn’t make a lot of sense, no sense at all to my mind. I certainly did believe it once upon a time, along with ECT; and when I lost my faith I didn’t lose my belief in these things - I just saw myself as a rebel on the lines of ‘If all are not saved, then I reject salvation’. Very slow processes of the heart brought me back to faith with a new understanding (and these slow processes are still going on, and probably always will be until the final Restoration ).
These days with someone who believes in ‘substitutionary atonement’ and ECT, I’d want to listen carefully to what is behind their beliefs. Some people have a surface structure to their beliefs that I find difficult and sometimes repellent, but a deep structure that is actually grounded in the unlimited Love of God. With others there appears to be little difference between the surface and deep structures - but we can but hope. 
Good thoughts Dick. Listening properly and patiently getting to know people is not just polite, it is wise and essential. There’s nothing worse than just diving in and telling people they are wrong! Until quite recently I had a lot of slightly confused and contradictory ideas about various doctrines - but my heart was in the right place. Not saying I’ve got it all sorted out now, but I thank God for people who have been patient with me over the years and have helped me discover a more integrated and consistent faith.
know what you mean lol i couldn’t stop myself from facebook debating someone that posted an awful video about God’s wrath. i realised i needed to bow out as we were talking in different languages really…i couldn’t build my arguments without reference to their premises, which took me YEARS to understand. and this guy loves his American fire and brimstone vile lies. i think it’s a masochistic need to feel guilty, honestly.
anyway…as to penal substitution, it never properly made sense to me either! i went along with it though in the past as i was presented with no alternatives, kinda like pre-trib, creationism, and calvminianism. thankfully that has now changed!
Thanks Drew– we’ve seem to have travelled the same way (or at least similar ways). And Corpselight, I can also empathise with the anger that many work through when abandoning beliefs in ETC and/or Penal Substitution – whoa I’ve been there, read the book, seen the film… (and it still hasn’t completely gone away).
I think there’s also another issue concerning our empathy for those with whom we differ. The Tentmakers site has a hard core, page of ECT quotations (that should be ‘triple x rated’) which I came across a couple of days after Christmas (I’m not in favour of censorship but wouldn’t recommend the page as bed time reading!!!). On it there is a particularly appalling example of a hellfire sermon by Dr Pusey, a Victorian Anglican of the High church traditionalist wing. It is so appalling in its fanatic and sadistic imaginings that it shook me for several days after reading it; not because I felt convicted of sin by reading it, but because it seemed to betray a depth of lostness on the part of Pusey that was fearful - and I felt almost a guilt by association for having read it. So I did some research on Dr Pusey and found out that as a young man he had entertained openness to ideas of universal reconciliation. However, his much loved and cherished wife had died young, as had his much loved and cherished daughter; and the poor man had interpreted both griefs as visitations upon him of God’s wrath. From then on he was a firm believer in Penal Substitution and ECT. I know that such griefs have also affected the lives of Universalists and do not always numb the heart permanently – but I could not help feeling pity for poor Dr Pusey and wishing that there had been an explanatory note about him at Tentmakers.
I sometimes think about Dante’s Divine Comedy – in idle moments. A lot of ideas about Hell in the Western imagination stem from this – even for people who have hardly heard of it. I’m thinking especially of its dreadful Gate over which is written Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here’ and its concentric Circles in which the damned suffer ingenious and sadistic punishments for infinity appropriate to their sins. But what is seldom considered is that Dante walked with pity amongst the damned. In doing this he marked a turning point away from a time honoured tradition in which ‘Christians’ looked forward to scoffing at the lost in their torment. Perhaps there is a lesson here for we who believe in UR – sometimes we need to walk with pity amongst those who believe in the more horrible forms of ECT.
This puts me in mind of something I was reading about Burnett, an early Anglican Universalist. He imagined hell as not being eternal but rather as a place where sinners will undergo the equivalent of the absolutely horrific death once reserved for traitors under English law, but with the punishment drawn out over tens of thousands of years. He added that there will be holiday breaks in which sinners would have the chance to reflect on/process the experience. However well meant his imaginings were, given the times in which he lived, this to me sounds just bizarre, like something out of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I hope that I/we can do better than this in holding Divine Justice and Love together in my/our imaginations.
To return to Dr Pusey, I’m sure he was in hell in a sense – numbed and made cruel by grief. I’ve always found it interesting that at the centre of Dante’s Hell the devil is frozen in a block of ice – and the pain of extreme heat and extreme cold are virtually identical. These days I sometimes thinks of the Judgement in terms of ice melting – and the pain that will be felt being like that of a frostbitten hand in which the blood begins to course again.
Dick
Ive heard that the jews (a very vague grouping) believe in sabbaths during the corrective period in the afterlife. I think also no more than a year in duration is a common belief
Hi Jeremy -
I’ve vaguely heard about this too. I suppose that a belief in Sabbath rests from corrective punishment is drawing an analogy between corrective punishment and the workday week.
I think you are referring to what I’ve said above about Burnett the Anglican Universalist. I’ve not wanted to include the details of the punishment he envisages because it is so unspeakable - it’s a retributive punishment that could only ever dispirit, degrade and destroy; it could never ‘correct’ - so that’s why I found his way of imagining things, complete with the rest breaks, bizarre.
Regarding corrective punishments with Sabbaths - yes I can see that is a useful way to think of divine justice. (And all ways of doing so are in the end analogies – some better than others; and some analogies we have inherited from culture actually hinder our understanding of scripture). I guess for me the idea of corrective punishment and restorative justice dovetail together. The pain of coming fully alive is now (in a dim sense) and ultimately will be (in a clear sense) awesome and fearful and no ‘soft option’ - but it will also be for the Loving purpose of our Reconcilliation.
All the best
Dick
I realize theres no comparison between the two but maybe thats where the idea stems from?? Kind of like the doctrine of purgatory is possibly a vestige of the truth of correction in the RCC.