nicely said, Sobornost and Cindy 
The first and the last one are logically consistent.
…and thus we are justified by the work of Jesus Christ alone. That is, the merits of Christ (his active and passive obedience) are the sole basis of justification. Faith is the instrument of justification.
I think you’ve hit on the main point here. The more I think about this, the more I am wondering if the two competing theories under discussion (CV and PS) is what primarily separates Protestantism from Eastern Orthodoxy.
(I’m not sure of Rome’s position precisely, but according to the Catholic Catechism, they appear to hold to Anselm’s Satisfaction theory. sec, 1992 - “Justification has been merited for us by the Passion of Christ who offered himself on the cross as a living victim, holy and pleasing to God, and whose blood has become the instrument of atonement for the sins of all men. Justification is conferred in Baptism, the sacrament of faith. It conforms us to the righteousness of God, who makes us inwardly just by the power of his mercy.” from: link ).
I keep finding that the primary criticism (both on this forum and various web sites I am now researching from) of Penal Substitution is that it allegedly ignores the accomplishment of Christ in destroying our captivity to sin. Hence, you continue:
But it isn’t dismissed. Just because Protestantism distinguishes between justification and sanctification does not mean that we believe you can have one without the other. Those who have been justified are being sanctified.
I think the misunderstanding is because Protestants clearly distinguish between justification and sanctification. We say that justification is the act of God alone, while sanctification is the work of Spirit within us. We co-operate in the process of sanctification by availing ourselves to the means of grace (Word, sacrament and prayer) and resolving to obey. Justification is not a process within us, but a declaration by God concerning the imputation of righteousness (see Romans 4).
Sanctification is necessary. Protestants confess this:
Sanctification is “through the virtue of Christ’s death and resurrection.”
As I have read through articles concerning Christus Victor Theory, I have found it agreeable to what Protestants believe. Penal Satisfaction doesn’t negate that the work of Christ really sanctifies us. It only stresses another point as well, that is, we are justified by the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ, received by faith.
That we cannot fully comprehend the mysteries of God does not mean we cannot attempt to make logical sense of them.
I’ll not get into the rationalism vs. irrationalism debate. It was Clark (the rationalist) who accused Van Til of being irrational. The irrationalism of Van Til & co. with their view of “common grace” and blindly accepting that God is love, even though he will eternally damn those he supposedly loves, that defies logic. At least the rationalistic Calvinists (Clark & co.) are honest enough to say that God does not love the reprobate. They are cold blooded, but you know where they stand.
I liked your point about Christ not teaching through syllogisms.
Thanks for the explanation.
I have to work through this slowly, because this has everything to do with the gospel. Penal Substitution isn’t a lone doctrine. There is a lot connected to it. As I mentioned to Dick in my reply above, it seems that this has much to do with the distinction between justification and sanctification. The penal substitution theory was developed to clarify that distinction. To the Reformers, the distinction between justification and sanctification is a big deal. Why is it that the Reformers considered justification by faith alone, “the doctrine upon which the church stands or falls”? That sounds pretty serious to me. It would be arrogant of me to not give ample consideration to a doctrine that literally divided the church. Rome responded by anathematizing the reformers for teaching that justification is by faith alone. Maybe I should take my time and think long and hard about penal substitution, because men who were a lot smarter than me considered it a grave matter.
Jesus revealed the mind of God. He didn’t change it. God’s attitude towards us before the cross was no different to after. God is the same today, yesterday and forever. Christ doesn’t change God’s mind about us, but our mind about God.
Forgiveness presupposes an innocent victim. If I forgive you $1000, the innocent party (me) must suffer the loss of $1000 for the sake of the guilty party (you.) There’s no way around it. This is what forgiveness means. It makes absolutely no sense for me to force my wife to pay me $1000 before I feel I can forgive you. It would be both unjust and unnecessary. And since my wife and I both share the same bank account, it would be slightly crazy as well. 
We owe God a zillion dollars. We cannot repay. He forgives the debt by taking the loss. He’s been taking it on the chin every since we began to do intentional evil. We’ve caused God no end of grief, but it’s been hidden from our view. Christ has made it plain for all to see. In Christ, we see the suffering of God at the hands of sinful men.
The empathy we feel for God, our sorrow at his sufferings, becomes the mainspring driving our acts of service and love. Let us strive to bring God some joy and comfort in his long sorrow. Christ breaks our heart, and liberates us from self-obsession. By loving those he loves, by obeying his words, even by speaking to him tenderly, we can bring a smile to God’s face.
(Contrast the two crucified thieves. That says it all.)
Christ’s finished work was HIS finished work. Not ours. He made the way and WE must walk it. But there is a different path taken by those in the first resurrection than those of the 2nd… This is pretty basic stuff. Are you confused for some reason?
Purification by fire to a state of righteousness must be made before we can enter into his presence. He designed it that way. Who are you to question it? Imputed righteousness is not the same as being righteous.
That’s great 
– ponder it.
When you say ‘Protestants’ you mean Calvinists here. Yes justification by faith alone is central doctrine of Protestantism – against the controlling penitential sacramentalism of late medieval Catholicism. Justification by faith is not necessarily connected with PSA however. For example Luther’s more emotional and imaginative statements of Protestant justification are not tidy and forensic like Calvin’s. His atonement theory is strongly suffused with Christus Victor themes and whether Luther believed that justification gives us a real or imputed righteousness is a matter of some debate.
We co-operate in the process of sanctification through the imitation of Christ who is lovely and loveable. A chief criticism of Calvin by other Reformers of his day – especially the radicals – is that with his forensic syllogisms, and his division of humanity into those hated by God (and therefore not covered by PSA(, and the elect (who are covered by it), put a spirit of hate into him. As he wrote after the burning of Michele de Servetus (not an isolated incidence) –
" Whoever shall now contend that it is unjust to put heretics and blasphemers to death will knowingly and willingly incur their very guilt… Wherefore {God} does demand of us so extreme severity…and (to) forget humanity when the matter is to combat for his glory…(H)umanity must be almost obliterated from our memories…Many people have accused me of such ferocious cruelty that I would like to kill again the man I have destroyed. Not only am I indifferent to their comments, but I rejoice in the fact that they spit in my face." (Love your enemies? God is generous like the sun which rises on the just and the unjust? Therefore act accordingly?)
OK so the accusation came from Clark the rationalist – I’d thought the argument was over presuppositionalsim versus rationalism (and I guess, as you imply, the debate is pretty ’ in-house’ and esoteric to sectarian types of Calvinism). I just know the argument was bitter in invective and sectarian in outcome in fury premature (IMHO). But Friend it is this sort of ‘honest, cold blooded logic’ that actually seems to have driven you to the edge of losing your faith – which is the only reason I (and most of the others here it seems) are engaging you in debate as a brother in distress (although it’s only this thread where I personally still feel distress coming from you now. I guess it’s because you have put out a challenge about PSA and some of the answers you are getting back are confrontational in turn. Oh well…)
Anyway this sort of logic – where the two edged sword of faith becomes a syllogistic dagger – is not soundly rational (although it may have coherence). It selects some texts and syllogises them to make us bite the bullet that God hates most of his creatures and creates them for damnation. However, when other texts that testify to God’s all embracing love, and the character of that generous love as revealed in scripture are produced to counter this, the sectarian Calvinist takes refuge in the non-rational mystery of Gods’ absolute sovereignty to hold on to a faith sharp as steel and cold as steel.
I’ve always been tickled by the idiom of ‘Procrustes Bed’. In Geek mythology, Procrustes the Inn Keeper would lop off his guest feet or even their heads to make them fit the beds in his rooms more snugly (apart from that he was a lovely bloke and kind to his Mum 
). Logic can be procrustean. The syllogism for limited atonement may be coherent - but it has to qualify the ‘All’ of the bible so that All does not mean 'All it just means Some. A universalist would say that this is a prime example of procrustean logic doing a savage injustice to biblical revelation (there is an excellent biblical rebuttal to the TULIP contention that God only loves some human beings on site here written by our Jason at
Have a look at it if you haven’t seen it already - it’s worth serious attention)
Christ tells us that we are able to judge for ourselves what is right. Sure Calvin may have been smarter than you and I in terms of a facility for forensic logic – but perhaps your heart is in the right place (and where your treasure is, there will your heart be also)
Blessings - and I hope you come to a broader space - and that for you may well be touching base with a more generous Reformed tradition (even Jurgen Moltmann comes very much out of the Reformed Protestant tradition, rather than the Lutheran Protestant, Anglican Protestant, or Radical Protestant ones
Dick
P.S. I understand the idea of ‘common grace’ originates with Abraham Kuyper. Isn’t the idea here that God in this life actually gives certain graces to the reprobate - like the ability to love, and to be creative - and in this sense Calvinists can collaborate with them as human beings? However, at the judgement one of the torments of the reprobate will be to have this common grace taken away from them? I guess this does muddy the waters - if I am correct - and in a way at least you know where you stand with Clark.
Here’s a nice summary of the Eastern Orthodox view of Justification for anyone who is interested -
There’s a little more to it than that. The Septuagint translated from a different Hebrew. The writers of the New Testament either quoted from that same Hebrew or from the Septuagint itself. Thus their quotes resemble or are identical to the Septuagint, but differ substantially from the Masoretic Hebrew text type from which our Old Testaments have been translated.
In Quamram Cave 4, the same Hebrew text type has been found as that from which the Septuagint has been translated, whereas the Masoretic Hebrew text type is found in all the other Dead Sea scrolls.
It has been mentioned that the Orthodox view of the atonement differs from that of the Catholic Church, and is NOT that of penal substition. There are 12 videos of Mikhail Hany, a teacher from the Coptic Orthodox church who says that their view was the same view held throughout the centuries until the Catholic Church separated from it in 1050 A.D. The protestants who separated from the Catholics retained the penal substitution view of the atonement. Here is a link to the first of Hany’s twelve videos:
Allan,
That sounds all pretty everything, but I need to be convinced through the text of scriptures. I’m hoping someone can offer responses to some of the texts that tend toward penal substitution.
Romans 5:18-21 says that by the obedience of Christ we are made righteous. According to Romans 4:22-24, the righteousness of Christ is imputed to us by faith in the One who raised Christ from the dead, as he was “delivered for our offenses and raised again for our justification.” His righteous act of obedience unto death is herein given as the basis for our justification through faith. 1 Peter 2:24 says that he bore our sins in his own body on the tree. 2 Cor 5:20,21 says that God made Christ to be sin so that we might become the righteousness of God.
How is this not penal substitution? How do these texts fit in with what you described above.
Thank you for your time and help.
Dan, you said:
Absolutely! I’m sorry if it sounded like I was calling you silly for not just dumping PSA by the side of the road. It was my (apparently mistaken) impression that you weren’t willing to even think about PSA yet – yet it seems to be dogging you. It was that, I was talking about. I agree with you that you should think through this carefully and with the help of the Spirit and the Word and the word and the brethren (and the “sistren” too, of course.) 
As I’ve said elsewhere, PSA has merit imo; but it cannot stand alone.
I guess I don’t follow a lot of your assessment of “Protestant thought” because I was raised in the Methodist church. Methodist churches differ quite a lot from one another, but I never heard anything OTHER than that the work of Christ and His work alone saves us. I left that church for “adventure” in the halls of charismatic gatherings when I was in my later teens, but I never ventured into Calvinism. I didn’t even know the word until a couple of years ago and I’m old enough I should have done!
Because of this, I suppose it’s important for you and I to realize that we may be speaking different languages using the same words. It can be so confusing when you say this and I hear that, and vice versa. I’m not all that familiar with the nuances of Calvinistic doctrine, so I can’t even guess at where you might hear me differently than I intend. I suppose part of the difference may be that we did believe that we could “walk away” from salvation, and of course we believed that anyone might choose (on being drawn by the Spirit) to be saved. Practically speaking, I think on reflection that the Calvinists are right in the belief that the elect are the elect and cannot be otherwise. I just disagree with them as to what “the elect” means, and on the extent of Father’s family and His love for those I used to suppose were NOT His children (shame on me!).
Blessings, Cindy
Dick,
Thank you for your time and the graciousness of your response.
It is my understanding that Lutherans teach justification by imputed righteousness as well as Calvinists. I am ignorant as to what what Luther himself believed on the subject, but the Lutheran Augsburg Confession says:
I’m not sure what the Wesleyans believe concerning imputation, but justification on the basis of the imputation of the righteousness of Christ seems to be common among Protestants.
I appreciate your time and courtesy in discussing this matter. Y’all have been gracious. Thank you.
Wow, he should publish it as a book. He has no shortage for words.
I’ll take some time and digest it all.
There are sincere, godly people on all sides of these discussions. All I am saying is that I need to consider the gravity of doctrines involved. There is a reason the reformers developed the doctrine of penal substitution, and I need to sincerely consider before I make a judgement on it.
Thanks for the info about Moltmann. I googled him and he sounds interesting. I’ll have to do some reading.
Prior to the introduction of “common grace” the Reformed have considered God making the Son to shine on the just and the unjust as a matter of Providence. WCF 5:7 says “As the providence of God doth, in general, reach to all creatures; so, after a most special manner, it taketh care of his church, and disposeth all things to the good thereof.”
The Clarkian type Presbyterians along with the Protestant Reformed denomination (who split from the Christian Reformed Church over the matter) tend to believe that the broader reformed adopted the language of “common grace” to make Calvinism more palatable to unbelievers. I can understand why they would want to hold a belief in “common grace” as deep down, they have to cringe at the logical conclusions of their theology. *God has to love everyone in some measure *- thus, common grace.
Thank you for your help and encouragement.
Thanks Dan - yes I am a bit prone to verbal incontinence
Anyway here’s some quick thoughts from me on the texts that you’ve given and a blog article I found which I think is cool
Romans 5:18-21 says that by the obedience of Christ we are made righteous.
Christ was obedient to God in his life and in his death
According to Romans 4:22-24, the righteousness of Christ is imputed to us by faith in the One who raised Christ from the dead, as he was “delivered for our offenses and raised again for our justification.”
Our offenses – hatred, rage, exclusivism, injustice, false pride killed Christ. God raise him and gives us the promise of being raised from our sins into loving community.
His righteous act of obedience unto death is herein given as the basis for our justification through faith.
1 Peter 2:24 says that he bore our sins in his own body on the tree.
His burden was our sins not God’s infinite wrath against us.
2 Cor 5:20,21 says that God made Christ to be sin so that we might become the righteousness of God.
Christ stood with us in the place of abandonment and alienation – not in the place of Gods’ infinite wrath
Four Cringe-worthy Claims of Popular Penal Substitution Theology
Posted on June 20, 2012 by Morgan Guyton
I’ve often wondered if the same thing that makes violent video games appealing is why young evangelical guys are so infatuated with penal substitution theology. I figure a scary bad- !@#$%^&* God is cool for the same reason that the loud wet smack of a linebacker knocking the wind out of a quarterback is cool (I was that linebacker once).
I recognize that some guys need to have a God who likes to say “RAWR!!!” but in their zeal over penal substitution, some cringe-worthy and not entirely Biblical assertions are being made. There is a theologically responsible account of penal substitution; it’s part of the mystery of the cross. But I wanted to examine four of the more obnoxious assertions that I’ve heard in what I would call popular penal substitution theology (in places like a recent Steven Furtick sermon I listened to).
- God is allergic to sin
A pillar of popular penal substitution theology is that God cannot tolerate the presence of sin. I think it’s more accurate to say that sin cannot tolerate the presence of God. The consequence of understanding things the first way is that the cross becomes God’s inoculation for His sin allergy. Ironically, one of the main points of Jesus’ incarnation was to prove that God is not distant and untouchably pure, but rather someone who “eats and drinks with sinners.” Now this doesn’t mean that sin is not allergic to God. People reacted to Jesus’ perfect love and holiness either by repenting of their sin like Zacchaeus did or by lashing out defensively and crucifying Him like the Pharisees did.
It was not that Jesus couldn’t tolerate imperfection but rather that His perfection was intolerable. In John 3:19, Jesus summarizes the relationship between sin and God’s presence: “Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.” God is light; He doesn’t need the cross to protect Him from our darkness; we need the cross so we can survive entering into God’s light.
- God sees Jesus instead of us when He looks at us
In the Steven Furtick sermon that motivated this blog post, he said that the reason God gives us His “approval” is because He doesn’t see us when He looks at us but sees Jesus instead. That’s not approval; that’s deception. I can’t understand how anyone could possibly be encouraged by that. God doesn’t need our true selves to be hidden from His view to love us infinitely. His rage against the sin that oppresses us is part of that love. It’s true that Paul tells us to “put on Christ” and says that “in Christ we become the righteousness of God,” but Jesus isn’t a mask that we wear to cover ourselves up; He’s a body in which we become ourselves.
Popular penal substitution theology perverts Paul’s theology because it cannot recognize the sacramental character of the body of Christ from its modern individualist ontology. Jesus is not just our brother who stands in for us before God; He is also the one in whom “all things hold together.” So the substitution Christ provides is really one-to-many rather than one-to-one.
The phrase “in Christ” cannot be understood correctly without recognizing that Christ was already the source of our being as the one “in whom all things were created.” We are not truly ourselves outside of Christ; we are accidental constructions of our social context. It is only when we are “swallowed up” (2 Cor 5:4) by the life that Christ has provided for us that we gain the freedom to be what God has always seen in us. God doesn’t need to see a Jesus mask over our faces to approve us; His unconditional prior approval of us is the reason He sent His Word made flesh to empower us for holy living through our incorporation into His body.
- Since God is infinite, He is infinitely offended by the slightest of our sins
The legacy of penal substitution theology can be traced to a book called Cur Deus Homo that was written by 11th century theologian Anselm to explain why Jesus needed to be both divine and human. Being from a medieval honor-based society, Anselm thought the primary problem resolved by the cross is the offense that sin inflicts on God’s honor as a king. This became the satisfaction theory of atonement which evolved into penal substitution. Anselm reasoned that because God is infinite, someone who is also infinite (Jesus) had to become fully human to pay the debt owed to God’s honor by humans. Hence the God-man.
When I read Cur Deus Homo, I noticed an interesting phrase that Anselm used to explain why it had to be this way. He says in several places, “It is fitting.” He doesn’t say for whom it is “fitting” that Jesus pays our debt to God. Does God need it to happen or do we? I think popular penal substitution theology conflates satisfying God’s honor with appeasing God’s anger. They are absolutely not the same thing. We need for God’s honor to be satisfied through Jesus’ blood because otherwise we would not be able to bear the shame of looking into His face.
It is not that God is infinitely unable to understand the moral complexity that is behind our sin. He sees all the mitigating circumstances; He sees the good that we tried to do even in situations where we were ultimately in the wrong. The problem is not that God is an infinitely sanctimonious doosh bag who needed His Son’s blood to get over His pickiness; then it would be a lot easier to make peace with the dishonor we have shown Him. The problem is that we will be convicted and sorrowed to the point of eternal torture to stand in the presence of perfect love and truth without the assurance of Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf. The peasants need the king’s honor to be satisfied; otherwise they live in terror; so the king Himself pays the price for their sin against Him.
- God poured out His wrath on Jesus on the cross
The word wrath in Greek is οργή, the root for our word “orgy” in English. When you look at how this word is actually used in the Bible, it’s more mysterious than you might think. It’s not just a synonym for “anger.” Paul tells the Ephesians that they were “formerly by [their] nature children of wrath” (which the NIV theologically edits to say children deserving of wrath). To be a child of wrath according to Paul is to be owned by “the desires of our flesh and senses” (Eph 2:3). It has nothing to do with God being angry.
In Romans 1:18, Paul writes that the “wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness.” If wrath were simply “anger,” we could expect Paul to elaborate on this statement by cataloguing a series of natural disasters with which God responded to punish humanity’s sin. Instead what we find is an account of the degeneration of humanity through the innate consequences of their sinful behavior. God “hands them over” to their lust, idolatry, etc, but He is not actively punitive independent of these innate consequences in His response to sin. This seems to suggest that God’s οργή is the proliferation of sin itself.
When I read these texts, I wonder if we ought to think of wrath as describing the poison that fills the air and curses the ground when God is dishonored rather than an emotion experienced by a God whom we probably shouldn’t presume to have the same kinds of emotions that we do. In any case, what happened on the cross is that God the Father did not prevent God the Son from being killed by the Jewish religious authorities. He let Him drink the cup of (His/our?) wrath which He came to Earth to drink. But this in no way means that the Father was the executioner of the Son for the sake of His own anger management. When we talk about the Father “pouring out His wrath” on His son, we make Him look like a drunken child abuser.
I cannot find anywhere in scripture that makes the Father the primary agent behind the crucifixion of His Son. The closest is the Suffering Servant passage in Isaiah 52-53 in which we read that “it was the Lord’s will to crush him with pain” (53:10). First, I would contend that the Suffering Servant passage is primarily about Israel’s exile and only secondarily about Christ in His role as the recapitulation of His people’s destiny. The description of the Suffering Servant cannot be mapped completely onto Christ without compromising Christ’s divinity and the full unity of the divine will.
Secondly, in no place does Isaiah 52-53 describe the fulfillment of God’s wrath as the purpose of the Servant’s suffering. Isaiah 53:5 says, “Upon him was the punishment that made us whole; by his bruises we are healed.” In other words, the purpose of the Servant’s punishment is our wholeness and healing. It neither serves to fulfill God’s ego needs nor some primordial cosmic free market principle of retribution that God is obligated to follow.
We are children of wrath; we are born into a world that sweeps us into degenerative cycles of pain and guilt. “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which He loved us even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ” (Eph 2:4-5). I just don’t see the cross having anything to do with God’s anger though it absolutely does rescue us from the οργη that describes the innate consequences of rebelling against God’s plan for us as creatures.
I really think that these problems in popular penal substitution theology might be a reflection of what Christianity Today has called the “juvenilization” of American evangelical Christianity. When church becomes youth group for adults, explanations that speak on a teenage level become the norm for everybody. When I was a teenager, the purpose of being a Christian was to avoid punishment. I expected the rules to be arbitrary and incomprehensible. So it made sense to me to accept a savior who would rescue me from the clutches of the infinitely picky and thoroughly uncompromising High School Principal of the universe. That was the salvation I received when I asked Jesus back into my heart as a 16 year old (after I had already done believer’s baptism at age 8).
But I experienced the metanoia that is true repentance when God spoke to me in 1998 through a little girl selling dolls in the square of San Cristobal de las Casas in Mexico. He told me I could never be a tourist again. That was when I gave my life to His kingdom. That was when my heart was filled with wrath against all the ways that the world dishonors a God whose image was reflected to me through a barefoot indigenous girl. I need God’s honor to be satisfied. I need the cross not only for the sake of my personal relationship with God but because I cannot live in a world where the crucified are not resurrected. Penal substitution is an important part of the rich mystery of the cross — just not in the oversimplified, canned version that has come to predominate our juvenilized evangelical church.
Greetings Paidion,
So the point is that the Hebrew Text from which the Septuagint was originally translated was older than the texts utilized by the current English translations of the Old Testament, correct?
Also, just for clarification: When I said…
…I meant that these two theories separate Protestantism (Penal Substitution) from Eastern Orthodoxy (classical view). I see where I put the “CV and PS” in the reverse order which may have been confusing. Penal Substitution appears to be a development of the Protestant view of distinguishing justification (by imputation of alien righteousness) from sanctification (the imparting of holiness).
We need an advocate against the Accuser of Sin – this is Satan who takes his stand as council for the prosecution in the heavenly court against the Paraclete. Christ bears our sins by being handed over in willing obedience to God’s will to the Accuser and standing in our place as our Advocate. This is the ransom understanding of atonement as I understand it. God in Christ takes the initiative to stand in our place on the Cross and defeats the Satan, depriving him of his rights as our Accuser.
Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death through dying. Alleluia.
You take your time Dan - and do read Moltmann’s book on Christ’s Cross if you get the chance
Hi Dan,
Yes. Not only older, but, in my opinion, much closer to the original.
Yes, I think I understood you. I was trying to point out that the classical view, and thus the Orthodox view is NOT that of penal substitution, and that the latter originated in Roman Catholicism, especially as in the works of Thomas Aquinas.
I agree with you concerning the artificial dichotomy of “justification” and “sanctification”. Actually “dikaiosune” is but the nounal form of “dikaios” (righteous), and thus “dikaiosune” means much more than “counted righteous” as per PSA, but more often means “made righteous”, not by a sovereign act of God but by the synergy of both the “justifier” and the “justified.”
“Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.”
I take Adam to be Everyman. All of us die in Adam. ie. We all eat forbidden fruit, are ejected from Eden, and are condemned to struggle against thorns and thistles.
The prodigal son sinned against his father and found himself languishing in the pigsty. He tasted forbidden fruit, left his father’s house, and began to learn (by bitter experience) the true nature of his idolatrous desires. He was condemned by (and for) his rebellion. The merciful justice of God drove him ever deeper into the hell of his own making until he finally came to his senses.
On his return, his father’s forgiveness was the one act of righteousness that was needful to restore the relationship. On seeing his father’s suffering, understanding at last the depth and nature of his love, the son was transformed. Seeing the old man run to welcome him home broke the son’s heart, restored their relationship and, in a very real sense, raised him from the dead.
Or if you prefer, the son’s faith in his father was rekindled by his father’s great act of righteousness. The father therefore imputed his own righteousness onto the son, and declared him henceforth to be free from the guilt and penalty of his sins. ie. The son was justified by faith.
Again, because harm had been done, someone had to pay a price. Either the son somehow repaid the father for his loss, or the father bore the loss himself. ie. There could be no forgiveness without “the shedding of blood”. Fortunately for the son, the father chose to shed his own blood in love. The father took the loss. It became part of who he was. What’s more, it became his everlasting glory. We still praise the memory of this extraordinary man.
In the same way, God has taken the loss for our sakes. He took the loss into himself. It became part of who he is. ie. Christ “became” sin for us. In this great act we see the glory of God, and our hearts are moved to worship.
God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. Christ is the revelation of God’s love and forgiveness. He reveals the one and only act of righteousness that is needful, one that has the power to break our hearts and set us free from the web and tangle of sin. This grace is irresistible. It will raise us from the dead, and restore us all to God.
When you look for passages which tell why Christ died, you don’t find that He died to appease the wrath of an angry God. You don’t find that He died to take our punishment so that we wouldn’t have to go to hell. You don’t find that He died to cover our sins so that when God looks at us, he is blinded to our sin and sees only Christ’s righteous.
What you do find is that He died in order to empower us to overcome wrongdoing and to be enabled to live righteously.
*I Peter 2:24 He himself endured our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.
II Corinthians 5:15 And he died for all, that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.
Romans 14:9 For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.
Titus 2:14 who gave himself for us to redeem us from all iniquity and to purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds.
Heb 9:26 …he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself.*
What follows are excerpts from George MacDonald, The Hope of the Gospel, Salvation from Sin, chapter one.
The wrong, the evil that is in a man; he must be set free from it. I do not mean set free from the sins he has done: that will follow; I mean the sins he is doing, or is capable of doing; the sins in his being which spoil his nature, the wrongness in him, the evil he consents to; the sin he is, which makes him do the sin he does.
He will want only to be rid of his suffering; but that he cannot have, unless he is delivered from its essential root, a thing infinitely worse than any suffering it can produce. If he will not have that deliverance, he must keep his suffering. Through chastisement he will take at last the only way that leads to liberty. There can be no deliverance but to come out of his evil dream into the glory of God.
The Lord never came to deliver men from the consequences of their sins while those sins remained. That would be to throw the medicine out the window while the man still lies sick! That would be to come directly against the very laws of existence! Yet men, loving their sins, and feeling nothing of their dread hatefulness, have (consistently with their low condition) constantly taken this word concerning the Lord to mean that he came to save them from the punishment of their sins. This idea (this miserable fancy rather) has terribly corrupted the preaching of the gospel. The message of the good news has not been truly delivered.
He came to work along with out punishment. He came to side with it, and set us free from our sins. No man is safe from hell until he is free from his sins.
Not for any or all of his sins that are past shall a man be condemned; not for the worst of them does he need to fear remaining unforgiven. The sin in which he dwells, the sin of which he will not come out. That sin is the sole ruin of a man. His present live sins, those sins pervading his thoughts and ruling his conduct; the sins he keeps doing, and will not give up; the sins he is called to abandon, but to which he clings instead, the same sins which are the cause of his misery, though he may not know it — these are the sins for which he is even now condemned.
It is the indwelling badness, ready to produce bad actions, from which we need to be delivered. If a man will not strive against this badness, he is left to commit evil and reap the consequences. To be saved from these consequences, would be no deliverance; it would be an immediate, ever deepening damnation. It is the evil in our being (no essential part of it, thank God!) —this is that from which He came to deliver us — not the things we have done, but the possibility of doing such things anymore. As this possibility departs, and we confess to those we have wronged, the power over us of our evil deeds will depart also, and so shall we be saved from them. The bad that lives in us, our evil judgments, our unjust desires, our hate and pride and envy and greed and self-satisfaction ---- these are the souls of our sins, our live sins, more terrible than the bodies of our sins, that is, the deeds we do, because they not only produce these loathsome characteristics, but they make us just as loathsome. Our wrong deeds are our dead works; our evil thoughts are our live sins. These sins, the essential opposites of faith and love, these sins that dwell in us and work in us, are the sins from which Jesus came to deliver us. When we turn against them and refuse to obey them, they rise in fierce insistence, but at the same time begin to die. We are then on the Lord’s side, and He begins to deliver us from them.
Yes, if the point is only for Christ to bear the punishment instead of the transgressor.
If Christ is reckoned with the transgressors, though, bearing the punishment with the transgressors, then there is no problem – except that then Christ ought to be hopelessly punished with the transgressors by an eternal conscious torment or by permanent annihilation, when obviously neither happened. 
But that would be a problem for the ‘instead-of’ version of penal sub, too.
A much more nuanced and actually substitutionary model (not exclusive to other models of atonement, including the penal solidarity model), would involve the Father making covenant with the Son to save the descendants of Abraham (which by virtue of the two natures of the Incarnation would include all rational creatures since the Creator becomes also the descendant of Abraham) despite the covenant being broken by Abraham and his descendants (by the same token including all rational beings who have sinned): the visible YHWH standing in for Abraham as Abraham’s (eventual) descendant pledges His life to the fulfillment of the covenant and so dies instead of Abraham (or his descendants) when any rational creature sins.
The point here would not be that the two Persons are acting at schismatic odds to their intentions, but that the voluntary death of the Son is an action of pledge and surety toward keeping the covenant in place of the sinners whose place He takes in the covenant promise.
But (as St. Paul stresses) this is a personal covenant promise not a merely legal contract; so it isn’t as though God is going through some legal formality that once satisfied is of no further importance, much less that the Father’s wrath is now expended upon the Son and so He has no more wrath against sin to give (as though the Son and the Spirit never have wrath against sin!) If the person doesn’t accept the Son’s sacrifice, and more importantly if the person refuses to cooperate with the Son in the self-sacrificial death of the Son, no more sacrifice remains for sin and the person must be zorched instead. But the Father (no more than the Son or the Spirit) must not have a hopeless result in mind (and doesn’t in the scriptures cited by the Hebraist when talking about this), or He would be violating the covenant between the Father and the Son to bring all Abraham’s descendants to righteousness!
I fully agree with Paidion’s last couple of posts, btw. I don’t know that MacD ever had in mind the connection of Christ’s sacrifice to the Abrahamic covenant, but he’s entirely correct about Paul’s usage of the term we translate “impute”: it doesn’t mean anything remotely substitutionary, it means correct and accurate accounting. Abraham was righteous, and God rightly accounted it as righteousness. That doesn’t mean Abraham earned his salvation (or didn’t need salvation) by being righteous. Abraham was rightly counted righteous when he trusted the promises of God (despite the evidence of his own deadened body) about his descendants becoming as numerous as the stars in the sky; if we believe in Him Who raises Jesus out from the dead (in order to keep that promise to Abraham no less!), Who was given up because of our offenses, and Who was raised because of our justifying, then we’re behaving righteously to trust God about that and God rightly accounts it as righteousness. When we trust God and cooperate with Him, we become just instead of unjust, and not of our own power but by the empowerment and leading of God within us to do so – nevertheless it’s also a question of our cooperation or not: are we going to follow the calling of God, and properly use instead of abuse the empowerment He gives us?
But we if abuse the empowerment He gives us, and we act unfaithfully instead, does that nullify the faithfulness of God?! MAY IT NEVER BE! 
That is because where sin increases, the grace of God hyper-increases, for not as the sin is the grace. (As Paul has some things to say about nearby.) But if the Son simply substituted for us and the Father simply pretended we were becoming righteous, Paul would never have gone on to say (in Rom 6:3) that whoever is baptized into Christ Jesus, is baptized into His death, and are entombed with Christ (not Christ instead of us) through baptism into the death, so that even as Christ was raised out from among the dead through the glory of the Father, we should also thus be walking in the newness of life. We become planted together with Christ in the likeness of His death, for our old humanity is crucified together with Him, that the body of sin may be nullified, for the one who dies has been justified from sin.
We must die together with Christ, not Christ dying instead of us. But Christ dies together with us even if we haven’t yet agreed to die with Him. (That seems to me to be the point of the two rebels on the cross, both originally impenitent, one eventually penitent: the Son dies together with both of them.)
As for 1 Peter 2:24, Peter’s explicit point is that just as Christ suffered death thanks to those who sinned against Him for the sake of those who sinned against Him (which must include all sinners), so we who follow Christ ought to willingly put up with sins against us, even to the death, for the sake of those who sin against us: Christ has done as much and more for all of us, both us and them. But if we do not come away from sin, we cannot be living for righteousness; Peter certainly does not say that we do not have to come away from sin! (Peter goes on throughout the following chapter 3 to develop this theme further that we are expected to self-sacrifice for the sake of those who sin against us, including believing spouses for unbelieving spouses, leading into the ultimate example of Christ’s sacrifice for sinners, His descent into hades to preach the gospel to those who were once imprisoned there for their stubbornness! My extensive notes on this and some apparently contravening evidence from 1 Peter 4 can be found here.)
Certainly the most typical version of penal substitution would work if Christ was simply made sin: we would be putting on Christ the sinner and the Father would be seeing Christ the sinner instead of us!! No advantage there at all, far from it! But I expect Paul is thinking of the covenant promises made between the Father and the Son during the Abrahamic covenant there (where the Son, as Abraham’s descendant, pledges surety for Abraham and his descendants: the covenant being that God will bring all Abraham’s descendants to righteousness, his descendants coming to number an uncountable vastness.)
I have problems with typical understandings of PSA long before that: as a trinitarian theist I must reject the notion that the Persons of God have a fundamental schism in their attitudes and actions toward sinners (much moreso that the Father has to be convinced not to wrath against sinners by the Son!) And any notion of PSA that results in a hopeless punishment coming to sinners must be broken at the root since the Son was not hopelessly punished, so did not in fact “bear the punishment for sin” on behalf of any sinner. So even if a non-trinitarian could imagine the Son and the Father working at cross-purposes (so to speak) in regard to sinners (with the Son effectively winning!), though I don’t think that notion would do them any favors either in the long run either, the purported explanation of the action does not match the known result of the action.
But as noted above I don’t think all versions of PSA are broken. I just don’t recommend accepting an idea that contravenes ortho-trin if you’re going to hold to ortho-trin. I rejected (typical) PSA on trinitarian grounds long before becoming a Christian universalist, and would not accept it now for the same reasons even if I went to (back to) Arm or Calv instead.
Somewhere around here I have a paper analyzing the distinction between “justification” and “sanctification” in the NT, and my conclusion is that functionally there isn’t any: the terms are synonyms.
But since I can’t figure out where that paper is on the forum, I’ll just attach it here. Justification == sanctifiction in scripture update.doc (40.5 KB)
It means two or three things in the NT (conceptually related to one another), but not that. Another extensive word study: JRP on propitiate wage and reconcile.doc (125 KB)