Jimmy Akin

Recently we looked at a view of the atonement which holds that God literally punished Jesus on the cross—that the Father “poured out his wrath” on Christ as he hung on the cross.

This view is known as penal substitution, and its advocates claim that it is taught in the Bible.

For example, they claim it is taught in Isaiah 53 and its discussion of the Suffering Servant.

However, when we looked at this passage, we found that it isn’t a good basis for penal substitution.

Now let’s look at three texts from St. Paul which are often used as proofs for the view.

 

God “Made Him To Be Sin”

The first passage is 2 Corinthians 5:21. Here, after exhorting his readers to be reconciled to God, Paul writes:

(21) For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God

The first thing to be said about this passage is that it’s among the most difficult things Paul says to understand, and hard verses make bad prooftexts. If exactly what a verse means isn’t clear, you can’t use it to prove a technical point.

There are also a number of specific problems with using it to prove penal substitution:

1. The verse doesn’t mention anything about punishment. There isn’t a reference to anger, wrath, or condemnation. You have to presuppose that Paul is thinking about God being angry with Jesus and punishing him for our sin (i.e., you have to read into it what you’re trying to prove).
2. The verse doesn’t mention Jesus’s death on the cross. While it’s possible that Paul is thinking of his death, he doesn’t refer to it, and some scholars have thought that he’s thinking of the Incarnation as the moment that Christ was “made sin,” for he elsewhere refers to God “sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh” (Rom. 8:3).
3. The verse says that God “made” Jesus “sin.” If you understand “sin” in its normal sense then the verse is a poetic expression of some kind. Jesus is a Person, and he did not literally become sin (an abstract concept). Similarly, we do not literally become “the righteousness of God” (another abstract concept).
4. Many scholars have proposed that Paul means God made Jesus “a sin offering.” This is because the Greek word for “sin” (hamartia) is used as a translation of the Hebrew word khatta’t, which means both “sin” and “sin offering.” Thus the Greek Septuagint frequently uses hamartia to mean “sin offering” (Exod. 29:14, 36, Lev. 4:20, 21, 24-25, 32-34, 5:6, 7-9, 11, 6:17, 25, 30, 37, 7:27, 8:2, 14, 9:2-3, 7-8, 10, 15, 22, etc.).

Because of these ambiguities, this passage cannot be used to prove penal substitution. You can assume it and read it into the text, but you can’t prove it from the text.

 

God “Condemned Sin in the Flesh”

In Romans 8:1-4, we read:

(1) There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

(2) For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death.

(3) For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, (4) in order that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

The key part of this is the statement that God “condemned sin in the flesh,” which advocates of penal substitution hold to be a reference to God punishing Jesus on the Cross.

This passage also has a poetic feel to it, and it certainly includes non-literal elements. Physical flesh (Greek, sarx) did not literally weaken the Law of Moses, or any other law. Laws belong to a fundamentally different and abstract category than physical flesh, which has no ability to literally weaken them.

Neither, with respect to the phrase “sinful flesh,” is physical flesh literally sinful. Sinfulness is a quality that persons have, not a quality of meat.

Similarly, there is a metaphor involved in saying that Christians “walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” (Actually, we do walk using our leg muscles.)

These non-literal elements become clearer when one realizes that Paul uses the term “flesh” metaphorically as a reference to fallen human nature, though scholars have found it difficult to determine the precise nuances with which he uses it.

As before, it’s difficult to use a text incorporating ambiguous, poetic elements to establish a technical point, and this is especially true when the key, ambiguous and poetic element is part of the crucial phrase: God “condemned sin in the flesh.”

That could mean any number of things. Just what “flesh” is being referred to? Christ’s physical flesh (i.e., his physical body)? The physical flesh of mankind in general? Fallen human nature as the abstract concept in which sin is depicted as residing?

The first is what advocates of penal substitution need Paul to be saying, but given the way he uses the term flesh, the last is more likely what he means: That is, God condemned the sin that is part of human nature.

Then we need to deal with the meaning of “condemned” (Greek, katakrinô). Advocates of penal substitution need this to mean “punished,” but that’s not what the term means.

As the standard reference work A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (3^rd ed.) by Bauer, Danker, Arndt, and Gingrich notes, the basic meaning of katakrinô is “pronounce a sentence after determination of guilt.”

This could mean a number of things, but it need mean no more than God issued a legal finding that sin is wrong/a bad thing/abhorrent/something to be rejected—and even that appears to be as a legal metaphor since we don’t literally have a courtroom setting.

This is seen, with particular clarity, when we consider the time that Paul points to when he says God issued this finding. He says God did it “by sending his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh.” Although he also says God did this “for sin” (peri harmartias; i.e., concerning sin or with reference to sin), the point at which God sent his son was the Incarnation, not the Cross.

Thus what advocates of penal substitution need this passage to say is “God punished Jesus in his physical body on the Cross,” but it doesn’t say that.

Given the known meanings of the terms, the key part of the passage more probably means: By sending his Son in the likeness of sinful humanity at the Incarnation, in order to deal with sin, God expressed disapproval of the sin that is part of fallen human nature.

This passage thus also is not a successful prooftext for penal substitution.

 

Jesus and “the Curse of the Law”

Finally, in Galatians 3:13-14, we read:

(13) Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed be everyone who hangs on a tree”—(14) that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.

“The Law” that Paul refers to is the Law of Moses, as illustrated by the quotation he gives. It is from a passage in Deuteronomy that deals with how the Israelites were to treat the bodies of men after execution for their crimes:

(22) And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, (23) his body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is accursed by God; you shall not defile your land which the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance (Deut. 21:22-23).

According to this translation, “a hanged man is accursed by God,” and consequently “his body shall not remain all night upon the tree” because otherwise this would “defile your land which the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance.”

It is not clear why letting the body remain on the tree overnight, as opposed to a shorter time, would defile the land. Perhaps the thought is that any hanging of a man on a tree defiles the land, but leaving the body for a longer time does so in a more egregious way.

Alternately, the defilement may come not by the hanging of the body but in the denial of proper burial, which according to Jewish custom was done on the same day. Some have thus translated the phrase for “accursed by God” (quillat elôhim) as “an insult to God,” “a repudiation of God,” or “an affront to God” (so the Jewish Publication Society’s Tanak Version). As the Jewish Publication Society notes:

The present translation reflects a rabbinic explanation that the criminal’s body may not be maltreated since that would be an offense against God in whose image even the criminal was created (JPS Torah Commentary: Deuteronomy, at 21:23).

Also, it should be noted that, unlike the case of Jesus, hanging on the “tree” (the Hebrew word can mean just a wooden stake or structure) was not the method of execution. Crucifixion was not practiced in ancient Israel. The text presupposes that execution has been carried out by the normal means—stoning or the sword—and what is envisioned is a display of the body after death for purposes of deterrence or posthumous humiliation.

With this as background, how does Paul apply the passage to Jesus’ situation? Several points should be made:

1. The passage is not an exact fit for what happened to Jesus since in his case the method of execution was crucifixion; his body was not simply displayed after he was executed by other means.
2. Paul adapts the quotation to avoid saying that God cursed Jesus. In the Septuagint, the passage says “all who hang on a tree are cursed from God” (Lexham English Septuagint), but Paul conspicuously removes the reference to God, apparently precisely to avoid saying that God cursed Jesus.
3. Instead, Paul identifies the source of the curse as the Law of Moses. He says that Jesus redeemed us from “the curse of the Law” so that “the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles.” He then goes on in the following verses to describe the Law as an inferior and only partial expression of God’s will: “This is what I mean: the law, which came four hundred and thirty years afterward, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void. . . . It was ordained by angels through an intermediary. Now an intermediary implies more than one; but God is one” (Gal. 3:17-20).
4. The passage in Deuteronomy is a minor piece of legislation that does not sum up or serve as a capstone to the Mosaic Law. It is an obscure passage that has been employed here because it mentions a curse and has a partial similarity to the situation of Christ’s death. It thus represents an accommodated application rather than a direct one of the kind needed to make a key point about the nature of the atonement.

What advocates of penal substitution need Galatians 3:13 to say is that God cursed Jesus—and even that might not be enough, because to curse someone could merely mean passing a negative legal sentence rather than actively punishing. Yet Paul conspicuously avoids saying this and instead identifies the Law as the source of the curse.

In view of the discontinuity between Jesus’ situation and the one envisioned in Deuteronomy, Paul’s avoidance of the needed statement, and the general ambiguity of the passage, it is not a solid basis for the claim that God literally punished Jesus.

We thus see that none of the three passages we have considered provide proof of penal substitution, which is already very problematic on other grounds.