Featured Christ's victory over Satan

What that means is the punishment for our sins fell upon Him.

If you do not believe that the punishment for our sins fell on Jesus, then you are correct that you may not hold the Penal Substitution Theory of Atonement.

Men like RC Sproul and Author Pink held the Penal Substitution Theory of Atonement. They even thought that God saw Jesus as if He were a sinner and punished Him (or our sins in Him, as He was sinless) instead of us.

But you and I both know that you are playing a word game (God didn't punish Jesus, He just punished our sins that He laid on Jesus....a very stupid argument).

We already established (AND YOU AGREED) that sinners, not sinful actions, are punished. That is men, not what men did, are punished (people are punished for sins). So now you are pretending that God did not punish a Person but instead punished actions and thoughts that were on that Person. How intellectually dishonest.



I have invited you to prove the Penal Substitution Theory of Atonement via Scripture. You failed everytime you tried (you always had to resort to "Scripture says... BUT it means ...and teaches...."

I have always been amazed that you thought posting verses we all agree on proves Penal Substitution Theory. I think by now everybody realizes the theory is one of several and is not stated in God's Word.

 

Torrance believed in what he called "total substitution". This is also called "medical substitution"and "ontological substitution". It is the Classic View of Christ as our substitute, dying on our behalf.

I think you are mixing up a couple of things here. That is understandable because the language is the same.

N.T. Wright (along the same lines as Torrance) illustrated it along the lines of you seeing a man receiving a briefcase at an airport. It could be the man is a spy. But it could be an attendant returning a briefcase he left on a plane. Or a family member giving it to him. The fact is a man received the case, but the context will determine what that means.

The Classic View does hold that "through the shedding of his blood, Christ offered himself in sacrifice, in amen to God's righteous judgement upon our sin and so accepted our judgement or our infliction in our place. In so doing he took to himself and upon himself the righteous wrath of the divine love and freed us from receiving the stroke of divine condemnation which we could not have endured, for under it we could only have been destroyed".

I agree with that completely. Your mistake is in thinking only Penal Substitution Theory deals with sin and divine justice.

A major difference is how Christ died in our place. Is this on our behalf or instead of us? In other words, does it mean that we do not experience the wages of sin or that Christ also experienced these wages and in Him we are delivered through that death.

Now, don't get me wrong.....I'm not saying to follow Torrance. I just used him as an example of a scholar who rejected the Penal Substitution Theory of Atonement yet maintained that Christ died for us.

 

It is above all in the Cross of Christ that evil is unmasked for what it actually is, in its inconceivable wickedness and malevolence, in its sheer contradiction of the love of God incarnate in Jesus Christ, in its undiluted enmity to God himself—not to mention the way in which it operates under the cover of the right and the good and the lawful. That the infinite God should take the way of the Cross to save mankind from the pit of evil which has engulfed it and deceived it, is the measure of the evil of evil: its depth is revealed to be ‘absymal’ (literally, ‘without bottom’). However, it is only from the vantage point of God’s victory over evil in the resurrection of Christ, from the bridge which in him God has overthrown across the chasm of evil that has opened up in our violence and death and guilt, that we may look into the full horror of it all and not be destroyed in the withering of our souls through misanthropy, pessimism, and despair. What hope could there ever be for a humanity that crucifies the incarnate love of God and sets itself implacably against the order of divine love even at the point of its atoning and healing operation? But the resurrection tells us that evil, even this abysmal evil, does not and cannot have the last word, for that belongs to the love of God which has negated evil once and for all and which through the Cross and resurrection is able to make all things work together for good, so that nothing in the end will ever separate us from the love of God. It is from the heart of that love in the resurrected Son of God that we may reflect on the radical nature of evil without suffering morbid mesmerization or resurrection and crucifixion events, which belong inseparably together, has behind it the incarnation, the staggering fact that God himself has come directly into our creaturely being to become one of us, for our sakes. Thus the incarnation, passion, and resurrection conjointly tell us that far from evil having to do only with human hearts and minds, it has become entrenched in the ontological depths of created existence and that it is only from within those ontological depths that God could get at the heart of evil in order to destroy it, and set about rebuilding what he had made to be good. (We have to think of that as the only way that God ‘could’ take, for the fact that he has as a matter of fact taken this way in the freedom of his grace excludes any other possibility from our consideration.) It is surely in the light of this ontological salvation that we are to understand the so-called ‘nature of miracles’, as well as the resurrection of Jesus from death, for they represent not a suspension of the natural or created order but the very reverse, the recreation of the natural order wherever it suffers from decay or damage or corruption or disorder through evil. God does not give up his claim that the creation is ‘good’, but insists on upholding that claim by incarnating within the creation the personal presence of his own Logos, the creative and ordering source of the creation, thereby pledging his own eternal constancy and rationality as the ground for the redemption and final establishment of all created reality. (Torrance, Divine And Contingent Order)

 

This is a false assumption.

We know that Penal Substitution Theory did not exist until 1500 years after the Resurrection. You acknowledged this fact when you wrote that the "Reformers developed and articulated it and linked it with the Old Testament and Hebrews better than those that came before, but they did not discover it".

History proves you wrong. Traditional Christianity held a view of the Atonement that contradicts the Penal Substitution Theory of Atonement.

So whether correct or error we know, as an objective fact, that the Penal Substitution Theory of Atonement is not essential as Christianity existed without the theory much longer than with it.


Now, I do not agree with Torrance's theology as a whole. I offered him as an example of Ontological Substitution (the view Torrance stated that he held rather than Penal Substitution).

Torrance took Aquinas' position regarding substitution (I believe both Aquinas and Penal Substitution Theory are wrong.....as I've stated before). It at least Torrance said he did. You seem to know what Torrance believed better than Torrance himself.


You see the Theory of Atonement under every rock. The reason is any Christian who sees penal and substitution in the Atonement, which is ALL CHRISTIANS, you assign as Penal Substitution theorists.


Let me ask you:

Traditional Christianity correctly holds that Christ died for us, on our behalf, suffering punishment as our substitute in that He is the last "Adam".

Do you understand how it is that that is NOT Penal Substitution?

Can you see the difference in that statement between your belief and traditional Christianity?

 

Lol.....yes, Torrance did favor using "ontological substitution" in his lectures.

I can picture students playing a drinking game - everytime he says "ontological" take a shot.

But to be fair, scholars tend to emphasize what differentiates them from a given tradition.

Luther emphasized justification by faith because it defined his view among his peers. Torrance was reformed but emphasized ontological substitution because it defined his view among his peers.

So making fun of Torrance for using the term does not negate the his point in using the term.

 

Satan was a servant of God, even in his rebellion. This speaks to God's sovereignty (Satan is the adversary....man's adversary).

 

@DaveXR650

Now that I think about it, answering this question will explain the entire issue.

Christ died for us, on our behalf, suffering the punishment we deserved as our substitute in that He is the last "Adam".

That is not, of course, Penal Substitution Theory (it is actually my belief).

But do you understand how it is that that is NOT Penal Substitution?

 

The issue is believing it remained hidden until the Reformation.

More than that is your insurance that Christianity itself was ignorant of what you consider a central part of redemption for 1,500 years.

You are in essence saying a couple of 16th Century men coming out of the Roman Catholic Church successfully explained what Jesus, the Apostles, and Christianity for a millennia and a half failed to articulate.

Your faith is a departure from the faith delivered through the Apostles and your justification is they just didn't understand.

 

That does not answer the question.


Christ died for us, on our behalf, suffering the punishment we deserved as our substitute in that He is the last "Adam".

But do you understand how it is that that is NOT Penal Substitution?


I ask because you seem to realize that the Penal Substitution Theory of Atonement is a fairly recent articulation of the Cross but you still read the theory into every expression of Atonement (for example, you do not seem to understand Torrance's substitution as opposed to penal substitution as a type of substitution).

 

I am going to ask again as this will help me to better understand what you are seeing -

Christ died for us, on our behalf, suffering the punishment we deserved as our substitute.

How is that NOT the Penal Substitution Theory of Atonement?

 

The development of the penal and satisfaction notions in atonement owes a great deal to the Latin language and highly Latinised concepts as we can see when we compare the western development of these notions, either in Roman or Protestant thought, with the exposition of the penal and satisfaction aspects in the thought of Cyril of Alexandria especially. It was the penal-substitution notion, together with a narrowed understanding of justification, that became dominant in the centuries of so-called Protestant Orthodoxy and today in so-called Evangelical Protestantism.

 

I removed it to keep it simple.

I ask because that is not the Penal Substitution Theory of Atonement.

Traditional Christianity held that Christ died for us, on our behalf, suffering the punishment we deserved as our substitute.

That you take those statements as Penal Substitution helps explain why you read the theory in other writings.

Every Christian believes that Christ died for us, on our behalf, suffering the punishment we deserved as our substitute. BUT most Christians do not believe the Penal Substitution Theory of Atonement correct.

Torrance, for example, rejected penal substitution in favor of ontological substitution (the type of substitution).

This is true. But it is something we need to address rather than accept. Scripture was not written in a Latin context. It was not written in a Western context.

My complaint is that you and @Martin Marprelate read words of men in an entirely different context than they were written and assign to those men beliefs those people's fuller statements reject because the language is similar or they use Bible verses.

That is why I asked if you believed the statement I offered was Penal Substitution. The reason is it is not, yet you read your theory into that statement.

I take it you have never read Thomas Aquinas or Augustine, so you read "punishment" as "punishment for sin", "substitution" as "penal substitution" rather than "medical/ total/ ontological substitution" and "for" as "instead of" rather than "in one's behalf".