Today we come to what is undoubtedly the most well-known and popular perspective on the atonement in Christianity today, substitutionary atonement, the belief that on the cross, Jesus took on himself the punishment from God that we deserved. It’s so common that for many contemporary Christians, questioning it is tantamount to questioning the faith itself. And yet, it is a relative newcomer on the scene, and as we’ll see, it relies on some questionable assumptions about both God and Judaism. I’ve addressed this a few times over the history of the blog (especially in the series a couple years ago on different biblical images for sin and salvation), so rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ll largely be quoting from those posts.
Substitutionary atonement can be thought of as the daughter of Anselm’s satisfaction theory, and it shares a lot of its characteristics: It posits that the barrier between us and salvation lies in God’s holiness and justice rather than some outside factor, it holds that we are all individually guilty before God and are unable to pay the price ourselves, and that Jesus, in his full humanity and full divinity, voluntarily did this on our behalf. But, while Anselm understood this problem in terms of restorative justice — a debt of honour needing to be satisfied — later theologians, beginning with Thomas Aquinas (13th C), and including most of the major Reformers, thought of it in terms of retributive justice: Divine justice requires that humanity be punished for its sins. Aquinas made this step because he believed that, because we derive pleasure from our sins, it isn’t enough simply to stop sinning or make restitution; rather we needed to be punished to an equal measure as the pleasure we experienced. As I’ve previously written on this:
We are able to do this for our individual sins through acts of penance, but original sin — the Western Christian idea that we are damned from conception by virtue of Adam’s rebellion against God — remains untouched. Humanity is unable to take on enough punishment to compensate for original sin, and so God steps in by sending Jesus, who, as God-and-human, is able to do so on our behalf.
Continuing that narrative in the Protestant Reformation:
The Swiss Reformer John Calvin pushed this theology even further. Believing in what he called “total depravity” — that humanity is so inherently sinful that we are unable to do anything good — Calvin insisted that we are all under a death penalty before God. As Romans 6.23 ‘plainly’ says, “The wages of sin is death.” God is first and foremost just and holy. And God’s justice means that God cannot abide or ignore sin. We have marred creation and must suffer for it. Again, this conflict between God’s justice and love is resolved by the incarnation and sacrificial death of Jesus, who suffers on our behalf.
Notice the steady progression here. From the Church Fathers to Anselm there was a shift from Christ as our champion ransoming us from a spiritual enemy to Christ paying a debt of honour to God. From Anselm to Aquinas the debt of honour needing to be paid becomes a debt of merit needing to be made up through punishment. And now from Aquinas to Calvin, satisfaction as a form of penance becomes a satisfaction of divine wrath.
Advocates of this perspective on the atonement find support for it in many parts of the Bible, including the Suffering Servant, “wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53, referenced in the New Testament in 1 Peter 2.23f), the sacrificial language Paul uses for Christ (e.g., “…Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood…” (Romans 3.24)), and the many texts which talk of Jesus dying “for” us:
These texts use sacrificial language to understand the meaning of Jesus’ death. The logic is that just as the Old Testament sacrifices of rams and goats acted as substitutes for the human lives owed to God, so too does Jesus’s sacrifice substitute for our own. And this has been the dominant way this language has been understood in Western Christianity for the past thousand years.
Because these ideas are so common, I don’ think they need to be unpacked too much more than this. So I’m going to move right on to the summary table now before the assessment portion, which will take quite a bit more space and time.
| What does it say about God? | God is holy and just |
|---|---|
| What does it say about humanity? | Humanity is inherently sinful. |
| How does it define sin? | Sin is violation of God’s laws |
| How does it define the problem? | Humanity stands guilty before God and under a death sentence. |
| What does it say about Christ? | Christ is the God-man, who came to sacrifice himself. |
| What does it say about the cross? | The cross is Christ taking on the full weight of punishment humanity deserves. |
| What does it say about the resurrection? | (The resurrection is a symbol of the new life available once the consequences of sin has been taken care of.) |
| How does Jesus remedy the problem? | Jesus suffers our death sentence in our place. |
| What is the result of this for us? | By believing that Jesus died in our place, our sins are forgiven. |
Looking at these questions we see that this perspective tells a very tight and internally-consistent story: God is holy and cannot abide sin, which makes God angry and which needs to be punished; we all sin and stand condemned to death; Jesus is holy like God and dies in our place; God’s wrath is appeased and our sins forgiven. But as tight as this story is, it’s also narrow: It has nothing to say about Christ’s teaching and healing ministries, and it also entirely marginalizes the Resurrection, leaving it as a footnote to the story. There can be no doubt that the New Testament emphasizes Jesus’ death — the Gospels have been called ‘Passion narratives with extended prologues’ — but it remains that the Gospels also spend a lot of time on Jesus’ earthly ministry. In Acts, it’s the Resurrection that takes centre stage in the records of the earliest Christian preaching. And, in Paul’s Epistles, there’s a strong conceptual link between Christ’s death and Resurrection. So, even if we accept the atonement narrative posited by subtitutionary atonement theory, it certainly does not account for all of the New Testament witness about the work of Jesus for our salvation and the problem of sin.
The bigger question, though — especially in terms of the Scriptural evidence — is whether it’s true. This story makes some big assumptions about God, Judaism, and sacrifice, assumptions which need to questioned.
Assumption 1: God is, above all else, holy and just.
There can be no doubt that the God of the Bible is holy and just, and calls humanity to be holy as God is holy (Leviticus 11.45). This holiness is formidable — God is revealed in such images as a burning bush, a pillar of fire, and a whirlwind — and even dangerous. And yet, it would be wrong to end here, as though this is the sum total of how the Bible talks about God. For God is also shown to be caring, protective, and loving. Not only do we have all the passages that envision God as Israel’s faithful husband, but we also have the image, especially in Ezekiel 34, of God as a loving shepherd. This passage explicitly also references God’s justice and judgment:
I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice. Therefore, thus says the Lord God to them: I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep.
This judgment against the fat sheep here is entirely about the fat sheep oppressing the weak ones:
Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide, I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep.
The point here is that God’s justice is inherently linked to God’s loving concern. Likewise, Isaiah 61 reveals the presence of God’s Spirit to look like freeing captives, proclaiming Jubilee (which involved the forgiveness of debt and the return of ancestral lands), and comforting the grieving. So then, yes, God is holy and just, but God is also loving and merciful, and these are not in opposition to each other, but always work together, harmoniously. God’s justice is mercy; God’s mercy is just.
Assumption 2: God is wrathful about sin.
Again, there is a consistent message in the Bible that God takes sin seriously. If God is loving and just, then sin must make God angry. But anger itself is not a bad thing; it tells us that something wrong, that there is some injustice in the world that needs to be addressed. So the question is not whether ‘the wrath of God’ is real, but what God does about it.
Assumption 3: The Old Testament sacrificial system was a way of appeasing God’s wrath.
Substitutionary atonement posits that Jesus’ death on the cross is the fulfillment of the Old Testament sacrificial system. That system, it says, was a way of temporarily dealing with God’s wrath until such time as Jesus came and dealt with it fully. But is this in fact how sacrifice worked? If you’re interested in this, I wrote a big post about this in that 2021 series, and I encourage you to read it in full. But in summary, the Old Testament used a lot of different metaphors to describe how sacrifice ‘works’, including consecration, purification, thanksgiving, gift-giving, paying tribute, payment, reparation, and redemption. While the idea of appeasing wrath may be read into some of these (tribute, payment, and reparation especially), it is not inherent to any of them. Moreover, far from suggesting that God required sacrifice because God was angry and needed to be appeased, the Prophets tell us that God rejects sacrifice when angry. From this evidence, one has to conclude that at most the appeasing of divine wrath was a minor aspect of the sacrificial system and was far from central to how the Old Testament conceived of it.
Assumption 4: The Old Testament sacrificial system is based in the idea of substitution.
Note that absent from that list of Old Testament significations of sacrifice is any sense of substitution. The only rite where substitution can be found in the Bible is the scapegoat ritual on the Day of Atonement. Here, the sins of the people are put onto a goat, who is then ritually abused before being cast off into the wilderness. But, again, this is not a sacrifice. So, if the New Testament does teach that Jesus died in our place, this is an innovation of the concept of sacrifice, and not consistent with how the Old Testament talked about it.
Assumption 5: The forgiveness of sins is the major problem presented in the Bible.
Contrary to the claims of substitutionary atonement, I don’t believe the forgiveness of sins is presented as the major problem of the Bible. It’s certainly a big theme, especially in the New Testament, but not a problem. In the Old Testament, there is no indication that the Law and its sacrificial system are unable to manage the issue of sin in the people’s relationship with God. Where sacrifice is criticized, it’s because of the hypocrisy of people who follow the Law when it comes to ritual, but not when it comes to justice: Sacrifice was intended as a way of managing sin, not an excuse to perpetuate it. But forgiveness itself is not presented as a problem for God. This is just as true of the New Testament, where forgiveness of sins emerges as an important theological idea.
Even before Jesus’ ministry, the baptism of John was called a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1.4), Jesus tells the Paralytic “Your sins are forgiven” (Matthew 9.2). Of the woman who washed his feet with her tears, Jesus says “I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven” (Luke 7.40). Moreover, Jesus makes it clear that forgiveness needs to be a way of life for those who follow him. When asked how many times one should forgive, he says seventy seven times (Matthew 18.22), which in Jewish numerology means ‘infinitely’. He also says that we need to forgive those who have offended us before we pray or make an offering (Matthew 5.23-24), and even ties our forgiveness of others to God’s forgiveness of us: Forgive and you will be forgiven (Matthew 6.12-15). God commands us, in our brokenness and weakness and finitude, to forgive others without reparation; it would seem very strange, then, for God, who is perfect, who is defined by love, and who is infinitely able to do all things, to be incapable of doing what God expects us to do. The only barrier, it would seem according to the teaching of Jesus, to our forgiveness is our own hard-heartedness, a refusal to repent and forgive. And, whenever Jesus uses the debt metaphor in his parables, the stand in for God is always generous in forgiving debt, without repayment. So, while the New Testament teaches that Jesus’ death was about the forgiveness of sins, it doesn’t seem to follow that this death removed a barrier in God that allowed God to forgive our sins in a way God was unable to before.
Assumption 6: The New Testament clearly talks about Jesus’ death as substitutionary.
But what about all the New Testament passages that seem to support substitutionary atonement? These have two major issues. First, most of the texts appealed to are really just about Jesus’ death being a sacrifice. But, no Christian, no matter what their atonement beliefs, has denied that Christ’s death was sacrificial. Questioning substitutionary atonement is not denying the sacrificial nature of Jesus’s death, only questioning what it meant and means for his death to be sacrificial. Where the New Testament talks about what Jesus’ death does, it uses language is as varied as its Old Testament precedents. These concepts include:
- redemption (Hebrews 9.12 &15; Matthew 20.28; Luke 1.68; Titus 2:14; 1 Peter 1.18)
- purification (Hebrews 1.3, 9.14, 10.11-25; Ephesians 5.26; Titus 2.14; 1 John 1.17)
- a new covenant in blood (Luke 22.20; Hebrew 9.15-22; 1 Corinthians 11.25)
- expiation (Romans 3.25; Hebrews 2.17)
- sanctification or consecration (Hebrews 2.11, 10.10, etc.) (from “Survey”)
None of the passages calling Jesus a sacrifice — and there aren’t actually that many of them, only about a half dozen! — can be used specifically to support this theory opposed to the others. The sacrificial death of Jesus is talked about using a number of metaphors, and there is no specific ‘theory’.
Another set of texts used to support substitutionary atonement are those where Paul uses the language of Christ dying “for” us (see for example, 1 Corinthians 8.11; 2 Corinthians 5.14; Romans 5.8; 1 Thessalonians 5.10). The problem here is that prepositions (words like ‘for’, ‘by’, ‘with’, ‘to’, and so on) are notoriously ambiguous and should never be used alone to make a theological argument. In English, ‘for’ can have as varied meanings as exchange (’three for a dollar’), duration (’for three days’), object (’waited for them’), benefit (’fundraising for cancer research’), causation (’she was grounded for lying’), direction (’we set off for Ireland’), and more. A similarly wide range of meanings is involved in the underlying Greek (hyper). Of these, the general sense of benefit was by far the most common, so without strong contextual clues demanding a substitutionary sense, we would do best to understand these phrases as meaning simply that Jesus’ death was for our benefit. Looking beyond grammar and at the wider scope of how Paul writes about salvation, we see that it’s less about substitution than it is about interchange and participation:
Paul’s understanding of salvation is participatory. We are baptized “into” him, we die and rise “with” him” and “united with him.” Elsewhere, he writes that in Christ God “will give life to your mortal bodies” and that “if we suffer with him… we may also be glorified with him” (Romans 8.11, 17), and he “giv[es] us his Spirit in our hearts” (2 Corinthians 1.22). As Stephen Finlan concludes: “It is not a matter of Christ taking the believer’s place, but of the believer sharing Christ’s place.” And again, “For Paul, Christ is the great transporter and transmitter. He transports sin and death out of our lives, and transmits life and goodness into them” (Sacrifice and Atonement, 88 & 93).
And so, among the many other ways substitutionary atonement misses the mark, it also minimizes what Paul was actually saying when he used substitutionary language. For Paul, Jesus wasn’t just like the scapegoat of old, taking on our sin and then going off into the wilderness; rather, in taking away our sin, he gives us his holiness; in embodying our death, he gives us his life; in taking on our humanity, he gives us a share in his divinity. This is the heart of the Christian message of transformation: A renewed humanity that participates in the divine life, in and through Jesus, the pioneer of our life of faith.
It should be clear from all of this, that I don’t think substitutionary atonement, no matter how popular it is, is very helpful or accurate. It fundamentally misrepresents God, misunderstands Judaism and how sacrifice worked in that context, and doesn’t do justice to the depth of how Paul talked about salvation. Add that to how it marginalizes Jesus’ earthly life and resurrection, focusing only on his death, and, well, I’m convinced that we can do much better, and need to do much better.
Matthew Root 
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