Q: “And if a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and he be to be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree” (Deuteronomy 21:22).
The statement above declares that the man hung on a tree and put to death must have committed some sin worthy of such a sentence. Christ is, axiomatically, without sin, and, moreover, we know that He died for us and that he took the curse that was ours. With that in mind, it can be furthermore noted that the Law also said:
The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin. (Deuteronomy 24:16)
This law clearly demonstrates God's judicial methodology. How, then, can Penal Substitutionary Atonement do justice to these verses, and Isaiah 53, without violating the principles laid down in God’s Law?
A: To the first text of Scripture quoted above, the Cross was, so to speak, the “mechanism” by which an essentially and eternally sinless Christ was enabled to receive the curse. The Jewish leadership, having learned their lesson that merely killing John the Baptist was not enough to destroy his influence, they conceived to have Jesus cursed by putting Him to death by means of crucifixion. This way they could “prove” that Christ was accursed and so destroy His influence among the people. St. Gregory Palamas taught:
Satan stirred them up and persuaded them to murder Him in a dishonorable way suitable only for criminals and the ungodly, believing that he would thus cast Him out of the world and make His name meaningless on earth. He was confident that when Christ died he would hold His soul imprisoned in hell. (Homily 16, On Holy and Great Saturday, paragraph 29, pg 128)
Just to be crucified was to receive a curse. And since Christ, who is ever sinless, rose from the dead, He prevailed when He was judged (LXX Psalm 50:6), and so reversed the curse of the cross into a blessing.
To the second, this is a case law related to the trying of specific civil crimes, establishing the principle of not confusing “immediate” culpability. For example, if a man’s son stole an ox, some would perhaps then want to immediately or directly look at the father as the actual guilty party, and then charge the father as immediately or directly guilty of the crime. This would not be to “impute” guilt to the father, but to confuse guilt with the father. The case law therefore protects against the idea of attributing actual guilt to another party. For example, after the man’s son stole the ox, this case law guarantees that his father could not be involuntarily tried in a court of law for his son's specific theft. For this would be to make the father immediately guilty of another person's sin, which is distinct from imputation, which is a mediate or mediated guilt. The case law in question therefore does not address the question of vicarious atonement, because the father would not be suffering “on behalf of” the son, but treated as actually guilty of the son's crime and so immediately responsible for the theft of the ox. In other words, the case law protects against, say, the townspeople, upon discovering that the son stole the ox, immediately running after the father. The imputation of guilt, however, as in the case of Christ's sacrifice, does not confuse the actual guilt of the perpetrators of sin with the innocent party, which is Christ, but rather presupposes and even relies on the innocence of the one to whom the curse is imputed. This is the sacrificial principle of imputation as at work in the Levitical sacrifice of the two goats on the Day of Atonement, as also discussed here.
-Fr. Joshua Schooping
