Featured The Classic View (just a summary)

It is absolutely substitution.

For when I tried to keep the law, it condemned me. So I died to the law—I stopped trying to meet all its requirements—so that I might live for God. My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not treat the grace of God as meaningless. For if keeping the law could make us right with God, then there was no need for Christ to die.
(Galatians 2:19-21)
There it is. Substitution.

Indeed. You are not God. God can go to the grocery store and be with you who stayed home.

Are you building your theory on a parable? The statement of the Father has nothing to do with the spiritual death of Ephesians 2, unless you are willing to state for the record that Christians can revert back to spiritual death after once being made alive. Can a Christian lose salvation by his actions and regain salvation by his actions? Your use of the prodigal son as your theological argument would preclude that very argument.

No, Jesus dies in my place, and he raises to life. I am found in Christ because Christ redeemed me. The substitutionary act is a redemptive purchase of a debt that I could not ever pay off.

Jesus dies for us. That is what scripture tells us.
"Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."


Your theory doesn't hold water and it certainly isn't a "classic view" no matter how much you and Jon want it to be. Call it by any name you want and it is still a view that very few people have ever held.

 

Probably not, if one accepts your definition of death, but I already know by your rhetoric that you do not understand the biblical definition of death.

Posting a series of random verses without explaining how they make your point when they are not addressing the subject at all and completely ignoring, or worse yet, denying the passages that directly deals with the purpose of the cross, is not wise.

Joh 19:19 And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross. And the writing was, JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS.

This is what the penitent thief believed that justified him. It was the gospel of the kingdom, which Jesus and the disciples had been preaching to Israel for 3 1/2 years and for which he was put to death. Speaking of logic, he certainly was not justified by believing that Jesus was risen from the dead.

That is not a Bible truth. Jesus dies for us.

1Co 15:3 For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures;
Ga 1:4 Who gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God and our Father:
1Jo 2:2 And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.
1Jo 4:10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

Ro 5:6 For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.
7 For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die.
8 But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

There is honor in accepting correction.

 

That Jesus dies "for" us must be understood in conjunction with Jesus dying "with" us. "I have been co-crucified with Christ."

I can go to the grocery store with and for my wife. I cannot go to the store with and instead of my wife.

Propitiation simply means wrath aversion or wrath reversal. It does not entail substitution.

Again, a substitute does not say "take up your cross and follow me." A substitute says, "lay down your cross and stay put, for I will be crucified in your place."

"Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple."

"He who will save his life will lose it."

 

To make the analogy work it would have to be that for some reason only you could deal with the grocer in order to obtain the groceries. Your wife was unable to do this. When you get home she partakes of the groceries because she is married to you and in unity with you. Her unity with you makes her a participant with you in your act of going to the grocery store.

You ere when you try to act as if a belief in the concept of the necessity of "being crucified with Christ" is some type of opposition or contradiction to penal substitution. Owen discusses being crucified with Christ 47 times in his works. MacArthur lists the concept of being crucified with Christ as central in all his books on importance of the lordship of Christ. The idea of us dying with Christ was not missed by the reformers or for that matter any Bible teacher I know of. What I don't understand is you and @JonC having such an aversion to penal substitution, which is also taught.

 

@JonC. I accept your answer as an honest answer. All I can say is that your posts (the first 3) I feel are inadequate in explaining how Jesus "saves his people from their sins". I also think the section in those posts explaining the sacrifices in the old testament is completely inadequate. I think the early church said a lot more about what Christ did for the condition of us being sinners than you put in those posts. So I find it inadequate.

When men of at least equal astuteness and sincerity as you do find in scripture evidence of penal substitution and say that it is the heart of the gospel, then you are saying, by your argument, that they have the gospel wrong. By definition, those of us who agree with them must believe that it is you who has the gospel wrong. I would at least ask you to accept the reality of that conclusion as you have freely expressed your side of it.

What do you think this actually did? You are not clear.

In you opinion, did this occur on purpose? If so, what exactly did it accomplish? I ask this because I think you are going to say he died the death we must die.

How does that help us deal with the problem of our sin?

See. You come close by saying that Christ suffered "our wages" and "was suffering for our sin" but yet that is not substitution. Well, fine. You can call it whatever you wish but at least allow that someone else may call it substitution.

 

@taisto
I'm sure you know already, but the Doctrine of Penal Substitution was held by very many of the Church Fathers. Quotations of these people are readily available on line.
Most of these quotations do not come from extended treatments of the doctrine of the Cross. The ECFs were taken up with debates about the Trinity and the divinity of the Lord Jesus, which were the hot topics of the 3rd and 4th Centuries. But the fact that many of the quotations are passing references does not make them any the less true.

When Clement of Rome wrote. 'In love the Lord has taken us to Himself. It was because of His love for us that Jesus Christ our Lord gave His blood for us by the will of God, His flesh for our flesh, His soul for our souls,' he is not writing a treatise on salvation, he is commending love to the church at Corinth, but the penal nature of the Atonement and substitution are plainly to be seen. When Justin Martyr wrote a very clear, though brief, exposition of Penal Substitution, he was merely answering a query of Trypho the Jew as to why the Messiah should be cursed. But these examples, and others, show that Penal Substitution was the default position of most of the ECFs. They show that PSA was widely understood and generally uncontroversial among them.
.

 

What you are describing is what happens in our direction. We agree with the idea of unity with Christ, dying to our sin, being born again and now walking in a new life because of our being "in Christ". But we also believe that Godward, there was work Jesus was doing on our behalf. And we believe scripture describes that. And it is penal substitution.

Because he experienced them instead of us. That is why you flounder in trying to narrowly define "death" so that it will, in your mind, make it possible to salvage your theory. That being that you need to claim Jesus did this for us and the way to get out of the idea of substitution is claim that because we will still die physically it could not have been "substitution". Such mental gyrations are astounding.

The concept of this being solidarity works except that it doesn't tell all of what happens. Christ dies with us, suffers with us and by our uniting with him by faith we are saved. I'm with you there. But why does that save us? Because it was unjustly done to him as opposed to what we deserve as wages? OK. How is that in any way effective for us? For it to be effective for us it must in some way satisfy God that this happens. If not, then it wasn't necessary that it did happen.
So, it could be that the guilt and punishment of our sin was on Jesus and thus the Triune God accepted that as sufficient for reconciliation to himself. And/or it could be that this satisfied a need in God's nature and sense of justice that somehow the sin of ours must be judged and judgment put on either the substitute or the guilty party. So there you have penal substitution and some elements of governmental substitution. What you do is stop short and claim the aspects of Christ bearing our sin in his own body aren't there. Except it is there.

Yes. But that doesn't stand by itself. Did he take the wrath? How? If not, was the cross necessary?

 

Do you hold the Christus Victor view or the Ransom Theory? Those are two old views presented in ancient writings. You have coined the "Classic View" when in reality it's just your own picking and choosing of points from other views that you like.
You coin words and make it seem as though the majority of Christianity holds your view when in fact very few people in all Christendom hold your view of atonement.
You have not been forthright, but you have created many threads that keep beating your horse. At what point in time will you drop this and admit that you haven't convinced anyone other than Arthur King who may be a "very close" friend of yours.
The Bible very clearly shows us Christ's substitutionary atonement for his brothers and sisters. Whether you believe it or not is of no concern to me. However, we've been provided more than enough topic threads to read your opinion.

 

Jon, simply because it doesn't make sense to you does not make it wrong. It would be nice if you would stop looking down on those who disagree with you.

 

Thanks for the clarification. So your view was non existent until 1931.

 

Wrath when referring to God is only expressing his reaction to sin and rebellion. You might be able to surmise that God just needs to get over it but we also believe that his wrath is a proper and just reaction and therefore yes, somebody has to take God's wrath. If you want to dismiss that as equivalent to kicking your dog if you had a bad day at work then I suppose you could but I wouldn't advise it.

Yes, but as I said, it is avoided for a reason because God's wrath is just and therefore should be. It's not like our wrath which may be just or may be nothing but a release of catecholamines and will pass when they are broken down. And us going along in solidarity is not a reason.

It's amazing how it seems ridiculous to you that someone would have to take the wrath of God if we don't yet you turn right around and agree to elaborate plans of how solidarity has to work to reverse all these things that have happened and therefore Christ had to die on a Roman cross. You get all that out of scripture yet won't accept the relatively simple idea that Christ took upon himself our sin and suffered God's wrath in our place. The issues of solidarity may have merit, but they simply cannot sufficiently explain our reconciliation with God. Solidarity by itself won't deal with our sin. It's not the "reason".

Where you are lacking is that with what you say we could identify with Christ in his victory over sin and death without him having to be under any kind of curse or under consequences of sin - because as soon as you make that a necessity you are looking at substitution and a necessity of his actual death, in accomplishing something on our behalf. At least Arthur is honest in that he just claims the whole thing was an unjust thing men did and the only purpose was to get Christ to a place where he could triumph over death (which although important is not a sufficient explanation for our redemption).

This is why even the modern guys like Torrance, who you used to use, still leave room for penal substitution in our redemption.