Featured Martin Luther and the Atonement (theories of atonement)

Yes, I have read that article. There are, of course, many that denounce his conclusions as intellectually lazy and dishonest.

When you look at what another person taught, it is best to look at the teachings of that other person and not how other people source the information.

The quotes I provided came initially from Vlach' paper. What I did was take the snips of quotes he offered and provided the entire context. I do not see how this paper could be anything but intentional dishonesty. The reason I say this is that had he included a few lines before or after several of his quotes they would disprove his thesis. This is dishonest. It is exactly what @Martin Marprelate has been doing to make the comments of others support his view.

BUT LET'S LOOK AT YOUR (AND THE AUTHOR'S CLAIM):

"But Luther did affirm penal substitution also as the following statements show:

'Therefore Christ was not only crucified and died, but by divine love sin was laid upon him.He has and bears all the sins of all men in His body—not in the sense that He has committed them but in the sense that He took these sins, committed by us, upon His own body, in order to make satisfaction for them with His own blood.'"

First, there is nothing in this comment that demonstrates Penal Substitution Atonement. Christ bearing the sins of all men in His body - not in the sense that they were His but that they were the sins of all men - in order to make satisfaction for them with His own blood is substitutionary but not Penal Substitution.

And if you read Martin Luther you will.....that is, you should....be able to discern the difference between his view and Penal Substitution.

 

No, exactly the same Luthers. The difference is I read the entire thing and didn't imagine him to mean something he didn't say.

Do you understand what Penal Substitution Theory means?

Luther claims that Jesus bore our sins, that He took on the sins of all men as if they were His sins, and that He suffered and died on the Cross bearing our infirmities, our sickness, our transgressions and that by the merit of Christ, His divinity, His sacrifice, His blood, all of the sin and wrath due us were engulfed and by this merit the Law was satisfied.

Do you believe that one can hold to Penal Substitution Theory while believing that what satisfied the demands of the Law was the actual nature of Christ suffering and dying a physical death by the will of God and at the hands of men instead of believing that what satisfied the demands of the law is that God punished Jesus with the punishment lost men will face at Judgment?

 

They were not far apart at all. Their main differences to us seem to be that Luther held to an already existing theory of atonement (satisfaction/substitution) while Calvin took that theory into an entirely different contextual framework (Penal Substitution Theory). And they differed on the nature of the Lord's Supper or Communion.

Do you think that their differences, although perhaps small, have larger implications?

This is what I'm asking:

Martin Luther taught that the Cross satisfied the demands of the Law based on the merit of Christ, His Blood, "outweighing" the wrath the Law required. Penal Substitution Theory teaches that the demands of the Law were satisfied by Christ fulfilling the demands of judicial retributive punishment (therefore appeasing God's righteous anger).

Looking down the line at the implications of each position, do you think that they could arrive at a similar soteriology but with a different soteriological understanding?

For example, I do affirm the Doctrines of Grace as expressed in the Five Heads of Doctrine (Canons of Dort). But I do not believe the atonement is limited because Jesus was not punished for the sins of some men (because I believe what satisfied the demands of the Law was not human punishment inflicted but instead the obedience and nature of Jesus Christ Himself).

 

I don't know if you've noticed or not, but when you (@Martin Marprelate and @Yeshua1 ) ask me for Scripture I give it. When you ask me for evidence of a doctrine taught by other men I give it.

Have you noticed that neither of you have provided a passage that states God punished Jesus with the punishment of the lost at Judgment? You've provided no passage stating that God abandoned Jesus for 3 hours. No evidence from the writings of Martin Luther that he believed Christ satisfied the demands of the Law in the sense of retributive punishment. You've claimed Luther did not really mean what he said when he taught that the demands of the Law were satisfied in Christ's physical suffering and death because of his exceeding merit, but when asked for evidence you have ignored the request.

Yet you ask me to believe your theory just based on your word. I love both of you as brothers, and I've had enjoyable conversations with the two of you. But I will not sacrifice Scripture for friendship. I will not, insofar as I can help it, adopt tradition over God's Word.

If you are gong to change my mind on this issue (and if I am wrong, I certainly hope someone will provide evidence showing my error) you will have to do it honestly. I can't just take your word for it (or the word of another article, or a creed, or a song, or a poem).

 

The lost will suffer an eternity in Hell. No, Jesus did not have to suffer in the same fashion because His Sacrifice eternally exceeds the eternal suffering of all men for all time suffering eternally in Hell.

 

PST holds that someone must be punished with the punishment due for a people in order for the Law to be fulfilled. Satisfaction/Substitutions holds that God is sufficient. That's the difference. I believe it is the Sacrifice that matters while you believe it is the punishment.

 

Yes. I agree. And Luther's comments agreed as well. AND Thomas Aquinas made almost that same statement as well.

This is not Penal Substitution. You are assuming a definition here for "punishment" that Luther, Martyr, and Aquinas rejected. That's the difference.

Do you really not understand? Let's slow down and take the statement you just made:

NOT PENAL SUBSTITUTION: "The punishment (Luther and Martyr have this as physical suffering and death by the will of God at the hands of man) the Father laid upon Jesus was in order to render full satisfaction for the wrath of God directed towards sins (here Luther and Martyr both stated the wrath as being towards the human race, but we may be saying the same thing)."

PENAL SUBSTITUTION: "The punishment (taken in the context of restorative justice - the punishment that was to be inflicted on the offenders) the Father laid upon Jesus in order to render full satisfaction for the wrath of God directed towards sins."

Are you starting to see the difference. Luther and Martyr viewed the punishment, the curse, to be that physical suffering - NOT a spiritual separation from God. And Luther believed that the reason this satisfied the demands of the Law was not the punishment but the nature of Christ. God dying in the flesh satisfied the demand of the Law (ended the Old Covenant because it was a covenant) and began the New.

I'm not trying to get to you come to my view, but I do hope at least you can see the difference between my view (which on this point is Luther's) and yours. We both see the cross as sufficient to meet the demands of the Law, but for very different reasons.

 

Maybe this will help :

Martin Luther taught that payment and satisfaction had to be made in order that we obtain grace and forgiveness. He presented a very good view of substitutionary atonement. And this atonement satisfied the demands of the Law.

Q. What did Luther teach satisfied the demands of the Law?

A. “with His purity, innocence, and righteousness, which was divine and eternal, He outweighed all sin and wrath he was compelled to bear on our account; yea, He entirely engulfed and swallowed it up, and His merit is so great that God is now satisfied and says,” If He wills thereby to save, then there will be a salvation.”

Do you believe Martin Luther's answer is Penal Substitution?

 

Thank you, and I agree sometimes it is difficult to examine our views via God's Word alone. We have a need, it seems, to conform things to how we want them to be.

I also ran into this wall. What got me over is the fact I was no less saved when I shared their view as I am now, having at least tried to move towards a more biblical understanding.

What I cannot understand is how people cannot at least see the difference between substitution and PST. It both frustrates and amazes me. It's like those exercises where your mind fills in the missing letters to words without you realizing they are missing.

 

Unfortunately most, if not all, of those examples were proving a substitution view. What the author did was in fact an attack on PST itself. He stripped it of its context to show others held a substitution view.

That is liberalism - watering down your doctrine to accept those who were previously opposed to your view.

 

I like your term “shackled”. @Yeshu commented that the difference between Luther and Calvin was small, but it was very significant. I’ve been amazed at how powerful Scripture is when unshackled from Calvin’s “contribution” (and I don’t mean this derogatory towards Calvin – I appreciate his work in other areas, particularly on prayer).

My initial difficulty with PSA was also that it failed to harmonize with certain passages of Scripture, initially with the concept of divine forgiveness. I had accepted the PSA answer but it really never set well. As I studied, other issues crept into view. When I wrote down every passage dealing with substitutionary atonement I quickly realized that none of them defined the atonement as PSA (for an exercise, I’d suggest some here write down their definition of PSA on a dry erase board. Look up passages that confirm your definition EXACTLY. Underline those parts in blue. Underline the unconfirmed parts in red. What you will find is a biblical definition that is satisfaction/substitution underlined in blue and the PSA distinction underlined in red).

And as a graduate student studying theology I started moving more and more away from tradition and closer to Scripture. What I discovered is that so many of the blanks my tradition of PSA filled in were never there to begin with. Scripture very often defines itself – it isn’t a puzzle we need to arrange and imagine what the missing pieces looked like (or leave them to “mystery”) but a clear cut revelation from God. We didn’t have to spiritualize Christ’s death in order to make it sufficient to satisfy anything – His physical death is sufficient because He is God. And God could forgive – not because He had already collected His “pound of flesh” but because of who He is. Before that time I had never fully realized just how humanistic PSA and Calvinism could be (we thought we were the one’s lifting up God’s glory when in fact we were lifting up man’s sins).

But it is hard to change. I still sometimes say that I hold to penal substitution because I believe both are aspects of the atonement and it's just the easiest way out. I guess this makes me just as wrong as @Yeshua1 and @Martin Marprelate who do believe the position I hold is PSA.

 

Wait a minute....you and @Martin Marprelate seriously want us to believe that Athanasius held to the Penal Substitution Theory of Atonement??? From your link:

"Yet Athanasius was also an explicit promoter of penal substitution." "For instance, Athanasius stated,

’Thus, taking a body like our own, because all our bodies were liable to the corruption of death, He surrendered His body to death in place of all, and offered it to the Father. This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men. This He did that He might turn again to incorruption men who had turned back to corruption, and make them alive through death by the appropriation of His body and by the grace of His resurrection. Thus He would make death to disappear from them as utterly as straw from fire.’

Athanasius also said, ‘The Word perceived that corruption could not be got rid of otherwise than through death; yet He Himself, as the Word, being immortal and the Father’s Son, was such as could not die. For this reason, therefore, He assumed a body capable of death, in order that it, through belonging to the Word Who is above all, might become in dying a sufficient exchange for all, and, itself remaining incorruptible through His indwelling, might thereafter put an end to corruption for all others as well, by the grace of the resurrection. It was by surrendering to death the body which He had taken, as an offering and sacrifice’.

Read what Athanasius believed. Is this what you believe? Is this how you define Penal Substitution - that it was by surrendering to death that the body the Word had taken was an offering and sacrifice?