Blessed Theophylact on Penal Substitutionary Atonement

Galatians 3:13 states: “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is everyone that hangeth on a tree” (Gal 3:13).

Commenting on this verse, Blessed Theophylact states:

One might argue: “It is true that he who does not fulfill the law is accursed, and that faith justifies. But how do we know that the curse has been lifted? We fear that having once been under the yoke of the law, we still remain under that curse.” Anticipating such an objection, Paul demonstrates that the curse has been removed through Christ. He paid the price by Himself becoming the curse and thereby redeeming us from the condemnation of the law. Christ (in His human nature) escaped that curse by fulfilling the law, but we, unable to fulfill it, were guilty under the law. This is like an innocent man who chooses to die in place of a guilty man condemned to death. Therefore, Christ accepted the curse of being hung from a tree and thereby loosed the curse to which we are liable for not fulfilling the law. This was a curse that lay upon us, but not upon Him, because He fulfilled the law perfectly, committing no sin.

This comment by Blessed Theophylact echoes that of St. John Chrysostom, who centuries earlier stated of this verse:

In reality, the people were subject to another curse, which says, “Cursed is every one that continues not in the things that are written in the book of the Law” (Deuteronomy 27:26). To this curse, I say, people were subject, for no man had continued in, or was a keeper of, the whole Law; but Christ exchanged this curse for the other, Cursed is every one that hangs on a tree. As then both he who hanged on a tree, and he who transgresses the Law, is cursed, and as it was necessary for him who is about to relieve from a curse himself to be free from it, but to receive another instead of it, therefore Christ took upon Him such another, and thereby relieved us from the curse. It was like an innocent man's undertaking to die for another sentenced to death, and so rescuing him from punishment. For Christ took upon Him not the curse of transgression, but the other curse, in order to remove that of others. For, “He had done no violence neither was any deceit in His mouth” (Isaiah 53:9; 1 Peter 2:22). And as by dying He rescued from death those who were dying, so by taking upon Himself the curse, He delivered them from it.

These two comments both agree in the principle of substitution, where the innocent takes the place of the guilty, dying in his place. In the place of the guilty, Christ received a curse in order to die in his place. Christ received the punishment of the curse in the place of the cursed, and so both of these comments agree on the principle of penalty. In this penal substitution both commentators also agree on the principle of atonement, that Christ paid the price of sin, delivering and redeeming sinful man from the law he was guilty of breaking, having Himself fulfilled the law perfectly. Therefore, both commentators agree to Penal Substitutionary Atonement.

-Fr. Joshua Schooping

The Mystical Theology of Penal Substitutionary Atonement

It is vital to clarify the relationship between Orthodox mystical theology and Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA). The previous several studies of the Church Fathers, including liturgical hymnography, St. Cyril of Alexandria, St. John of Damascus, St. Symeon the New Theologian, and St. Gregory Palamas, and also later writers such as Patriarch Jeremiah II's response to the Lutherans (with reference to St. John Chrysostom's Commentary on 2 Corinthians), Peter Mogila, and St. Philaret of Moscow, have amply demonstrated, along with other Biblical and theological considerations, also here and here, that PSA is part of the Orthodox understanding of the Atonement. And yet it remains that PSA’s connection with the “inner logic” of Christ’s sacrifice, as it relates to Christian life and praxis, may still appear obscure. Thus this study hopes to shed light on this necessary aspect of PSA, not only distinguishing it from non-Orthodox presentations, but highlighting how the Orthodox Church in her fulness draws fully from the wells of Christ’s Atonement not only as a past fact but as a present reality. In order to show this, the mystical theology of Penal Substitutionary Atonement, we will look together at its relation to theosis, which is to say its bearing on the relation of Christ’s indwelling, transformative presence and work in hesychia and nepsis.

To begin, sin emerges from (agreement with) the passions. Passions have and are energy, and in the Church Fathers passions are often discussed in terms of interior motions or movements. The fact that passions and sins are energetic means that their effect translates into objective reality and so are not simply abstract descriptions. Although evil has no intrinsic or ontological self-existence, passions and sins enact evil in terms of human ontology, which means that man incarnates sin and so gives real energy to evil. This energy, as such, is real and so cannot simply be “ignored” or “forgotten.” It has its own momentum, an energy that gets transferred throughout all of creation. 

God created a real world, and the passions, as internally disordered real energy, thus occur in the real world. In this way they have real effects, for sins are not written, so to speak, on a chalkboard such that the Lord will just “erase” them on behalf of Christ. Only an excessively abstract, arbitrary, and deneutered view of God’s Law would produce such a view. But sin does not exist in the abstract. One does not simply forget or erase a tidal wave. The tidal wave of sin energy, which is to say the real consequences of the passions and sins of man, must be dealt with in a correspondingly real way, and this is precisely where Christ’s atoning work comes into play.

All the energy of man’s passions, all of sin’s consequences, came crashing down on Christ. Remember, passions have real force and effect. They are put in motion by man, and so produce real misery (i.e. curse) and death. The inertial consequence of sin is curse and death, and Christ allowed this tidal wave of real misery and death to crash upon Him. He willed it in agreement with the Father so that the energy of sin, i.e. its penalty, would not destroy man as it did in the prefigurative days of Noah. This is why “in Christ” you are forgiven, the debt paid, the energy of the passions neutralized, the consequence of sin removed, the curse undone, and the blessing restored, for He bore all this destructive energy in His Body on the Cross: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree... By his wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24). The Father released the floodgates of divine justice upon Christ, in total agreement and unity with Him, so that man would not be destroyed by the energy man had unleashed through sin. In other words, when He went down into death, all the momentum of our sin, which He bore sinlessly, was neutralized and made to cease.

According to what might be termed the law of sowing and reaping (cf. Galatians 6:7), what man sowed in sin has a necessary consequence which Christ reaped on our behalf, for here also the saying holds true, “One sows and another reaps” (John 4:37). What fallen man sowed of sin unto death, Christ reaped unto righteousness and eternal life. And so without Penal Substitutionary Atonement the realism of the energy of man’s passions and sins are simply ignored. Christ, however, reaps the sin that man labored to sow, Christ takes it on, the totality of sin’s destructive energy, which is to say the Law’s penal consequence, in order to defeat sin and death on our behalf. Without this understanding, sin is reduced to a play of words when in reality it is the force of death: “The sting of death is sin, and the strength (δύναμις) of sin is the law” (1 Corinthians 15:56). This is why rejection of PSA typically entails a weak view of both the Law and sin, for they bear intrinsic witness to each other. 

To many, sin is just an abstract transaction that failed, an arbitrary justice that wasn't met, a nominalist description of what is not itself really that bad, and so in this view the truth regarding the intrinsic relationship between the energy of the passions and the consequence of sin, i.e. death, all according to the force of divine law, is ignored or treated as non-existent. What a travesty! God’s Law is not some abstract or nominalist code, and sin not merely a label randomly assigned to some actions and not to others. No, sin is an energy, a force that produces friction, i.e. suffering (curse), and death, and sin emerges from the agreement of the soul with the energy of the passions, the will’s alignment of the soul with evil, where the passions are rooted in the lies and deception sown into fallen human nature. The realism of sin and its consequences is uniquely retained in PSA, where the “penalty,” the just consequence, the seed sown, is reaped, borne, and suffered by Christ such that in Him the totality of man’s problem is met, and the complete solution delivered.

God doesn't merely forget sin, He forgives it. He doesn't forget and so forgive, He forgives and so forgets. The Father and the Son agreed that all the weight, energy, and force of man’s sin would crash on the Rock that is Christ, and so willed Christ to the Cross in order to funnel and meet it all there. This is the “bruising” of the Suffering Servant, the “crushing” He bore on our behalf. 

Surely He has borne our griefs And carried our sorrows; Yet we esteemed Him stricken, Smitten by God, and afflicted. 5 But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed. 6 All we like sheep have gone astray; We have turned, every one, to his own way; And the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. 7 He was oppressed and He was afflicted, Yet He opened not His mouth; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, And as a sheep before its shearers is silent, So He opened not His mouth. ... 10 Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief. When You make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days, And the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in His hand. 11 He shall see the labor of His soul, and be satisfied. By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many, For He shall bear their iniquities. (Isaiah 53:4-7, 10-11)

In other words, the tidal wave of sin-energy fell upon Him and crushed Him, and by being crushed on our behalf, suffering the punishment for our sin in our place, the tidal wave of sin-energy was dissipated and undone. It is forgiven in Christ because Christ met all its inertial consequences, demands, and ramifications, all of its, if you will, fluid dynamics (δύναμις). The totality of the Law's demands and consequences are totally met in Christ, and so in Christ sin is forgotten because it ceases to exist in Christ; it is destroyed, killed. This is why “in Christ” you are forgiven, for He destroyed death by death, which is to say the energy of sin meets Him and dies with Him. Once defeated, He rose from the dead, having exhausted all the inertial demands of sin, i.e. death. This reality is recapitulated in each Christian through Orthodox praxis, for in stillness and watchfulness the man of faith mystically encounters the need for, and the living power of, the Cross. 

The historical and the mystical or inward Cross are one Cross, one reality both historical and transcendental, and that Cross is both Christ’s death and our death, the surrendering of Himself and our self to the Father, and so His life-giving death is mystically the substance of our stillness. Stillness in this way expresses our co-crucifixion with Christ, for “we know that our old self was crucified with (συσταυρόω) him” (Romans 6:6). All the energy of our passions crash there on the Rock of His peace, are poured into that holy stillness, and His peace meets us and dissolves the energy of our passions there. This is the recapitulation of Penal Substitutionary Atonement in the heart of man: He takes our sin and gives us His peace. What He did historically He does also presently in a transcendental unity of history and eternity. 

Christ is our peace, the substance of our stillness, and so this is not a mere natural stillness that is being referred to. His death is our death, and so in Christ’s death, in the stillness which is the laying down of our self-life, all our passions are healed inasmuch as they are placed there on that Cross to die. It is here where the soul touches the Cross, in the depths of stillness, that peace of God which passes all understanding (νοῦς) and puts to naught the wisdom of the wise. It is here where one finds healing from the fever of the passions. The Cross of Christ and inner stillness thus form a mystical unity, and the death of sin in Christ is in this way recapitulated in man when he practices watchfulness and stillness according to the Orthodox phronema. 

In the state of peace all the energetic motions of passion are brought to a standstill, and in the space of peace they meet Christ, and so they are drawn out and neutralized in His light. This is the mystical or inner reality of Penal Substitutionary Atonement as it is received and recapitulated in the heart. The grace of God carries your sin and all the energy of the passions, and neutralizes them, giving peace where there was anger, love where there was separation, faith where there was fear, joy where there was sorrow. The stillness of Christ in you suffers all this on your behalf so that where there was death, now there is life, for the Spirit of Christ, being the sum and substance of all true stillness, is present in and as stillness.

To conclude, the inner logic of Penal Substitutionary Atonement, which is to say its mystical dimension, works in man to take the energy of passion into stillness, where it is neutralized and where new life is touched. Stillness mystically participates in the Cross of Christ, where the indwelling Spirit of Christ is the sum and substance of one's stillness. This peace which passes all understanding is the experiential dimension of Christ's atoning work being transcendentally applied in and to the soul, sanctifying and making it holy, unto theosis. Through the passions man is ensnared in the carnal mind, which is death (Romans 8:6), and since passions are internal energies, stillness is their functional death. This is how the peace of Christ is made to rule in the heart (Colossians 3:15), for the inner unity between Christ's vicarious atonement and one's present state in Him are made manifest as peace. As the penalty of all sin was placed on Christ and there healed, so in stillness all the energy of the passions are placed on Him (for you have been crucified with Christ; cf. Galatians 2:20) and so cancelled by that same peace of Christ. The historical peace of the Cross is felt as present peace in the heart.

-Fr. Joshua Schooping

Questions and Difficulties: On The Atonement As It Relates To Deuteronomic Case Law

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

The Transcendental Realism of God’s Economy: The Necessity of Penal Substitutionary Atonement in Relation to Orthodox Theology

Showing the relationship between Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA), on the one hand, and broader Orthodox theological concerns, on the other, is vital to maintaining a right balance in Orthodox theology. It is therefore important to note what the Patristic preservation of PSA accomplishes in a larger systematic context. The Church Fathers did not abandon PSA, and thus its role in theology is worth discerning. Penal Substitutionary Atonement is rooted in what can be called theological, or transcendental, realism. In short, reality is not grounded in itself, and so any proper metaphysics of reality or epistemology of realism entails God as the only true foundation. As the Alpha and the Omega, God is the Creator, Sustainer, and Consummater or telos of reality, and as such reality and knowledge must be understood in theological or transcendental terms as grounded in Him, hence transcendental realism. Although God is everywhere present and filling all things, He is not thereby blended with created reality; He stands in a transcendental Creator-creation relationship.

The import of the foregoing is that time, space, and matter cannot be utterly relativized in terms of a pure or absolute contingency. They have a necessary objectivity in their relation to their Creator as the objects of His providence. Moreover, they have no meaning apart from their Creator. As creations of God, they exist in a specific relationship ordained by God’s transcendental and infallible judgment. This bears relation to a key aspect of Orthodox iconology, i.e. that “matter matters.” Not only has the Logos incarnated, i.e. entered Personally into an unending relationship with human nature and thus materiality, God has also ordained in His eternal Trinitarian council that this would be the case. Matter, like the Incarnation, is not an afterthought. And not only is matter granted immortal significance due to its relation to the Incarnate Logos, so also is time. It was in “the fullness of the time” that Christ came: “But when the fullness of the time (τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ χρόνου) had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law” (Galatians 4:4). The Logos took on material flesh (John 1:14), but not in abstraction; there is no flesh held in abstraction. Christ had a specific material existence, one therefore conditioned not only materially but temporally. He is a divine Person in human flesh, and thus He is truly a man in space and time, a man that men could behold with their eyes and touch with their hands: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, concerning the Word of life” (1 John 1:1). In other words, in terms of the Incarnation, not only matter but also the flow of material reality as time is significant, and as such is granted supernal meaning according to the Incarnation.

Time, however, also cannot be held in mere philosophical abstraction. God entered into real time, i.e. a conditioned temporality. Thus conditioned temporality acquires significance in its specific relation to God. It is not just that the Logos entered time and space, but that He entered into that time and that space: Ancient Rome, during the Second Temple period of Jewish history, when Augustus Caesar ruled the lands. He was born in Bethlehem, to His specific mother, increasing in wisdom and stature among particular persons living in His local community. Christ, by His Incarnation, thus infuses this time and this place, and so all times and all places, with eternal significance, all the while preserving the contingent, historical dimension of reality.

To speak of the times into which Christ was born, however, cannot only be to speak of what was contemporary to Jesus, for He also bore meaningful relation to what preceded Him in time. Not only did St. John the Forerunner announce Christ, but Christ was also the specific subject of centuries of prophetic revelation, all the way back to the Garden of Eden itself. Prophetic revelation was grounded especially among God’s Covenant people, which was itself grounded in the Mosaic Covenant and the Torah, which was itself grounded in the Covenant made with Abraham. Notice, also, even the genealogies of Jesus, for He was not only in a moment of time, but in a developmental, connected, and providential history, and He bore meaningful relation to all of these elements. And not only did he bear meaningful relationship to them, He gave them their essential meaning, for all things in heaven, on earth, and in time cohere in Christ (cf. Ephesians 1:10). All time and space, all of history, centers on Christ and receives its deepest meaning in Him and from Him, and as such the saving economy of God binds all things together in Christ: space, time, matter, geography, and history.

The relation the foregoing has with Penal Substitutionary Atonement can now be made more explicit. For since Christ entered into a providentially arranged history relative to His own divine will, and the Torah reflects and expresses that divine will, then His Law takes on a meaning that is in an inextricable relation to Christ’s economy. Christ therefore does not sidestep the Law when He saves man. He fulfills it: “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17). The Old Covenant Law held profound meaning for Christ, according to both natures, for not only did He author it, and write the Ten Commandments with His own Divine Finger (Exodus 31:18), He was specifically and intentionally born under His own legal composition, for “when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law” (Galatians 4:4). In this way His Incarnation stands as the guarantee of the Law’s relevance to His ministry and saving economy. And so when people try to assert that in some way Christ circumvented the Law in His saving of man, not answering the demands of His own revealed will, they have profoundly misunderstood the nature of the Incarnation. He was born under His Law precisely in order to fulfill His Law, which is an explicit theme pervading the Gospels, especially Matthew and John (cf. Matthew 1:22; 2:15, 23; 4:14; 8:17; 12:17; 13:35; 21:4; 26:56; 27:35; John 12:38; 15:25; 17:12; 18:9, 32; 19:24, 28). Christ was so interested in fulfilling the Law, His own Law, under which He intended from eternity to be born before He even revealed it to Moses, that His Cross must therefore be understood according to the terms He Himself established for it. The Cross thus necessarily refers to the Old Covenant concept of being accursed, for this curse is set definitively within God’s own legal, covenant framework:

“If a man has committed a sin deserving of death, and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain overnight on the tree, but you shall surely bury him that day, so that you do not defile the land which the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance; for he who is hanged is accursed of God.” (Deuteronomy 21:22-23)

The Cross is clearly framed as capital punishment for “a sin deserving of death,” and since man has violated the Law and so deserves punishment and death for his sin, according to God’s Law, Christ God became man in order to bear the punishment and death for fallen and sinful man through the instrumentality of the Cross. This is not merely an overapplication of the Old Testament, either, for it is the very meaning St. Paul gives: “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us, for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree,’” (Galatians 3:13). Therefore, to say Christ’s death does not have a penal or punitive component is to fail to understand the covenantal context of the very Law that Christ, in His divine Person, wrote and inspired through Moses, and so rejects Christ’s own intention in dying in the way that He did. Sacrifice and Covenant are of a piece: “Gather My saints together to Me, those who have made a covenant with Me by sacrifice” (Psalm 50:5). Not some generic avatara, Christ entered into the Mosaic Covenant, into that time and that place in order to fulfill that Law and those sacrifices, and the fact of transcendental realism guarantees that the contingency of history doesn’t lose its significance in some sort of New Age abstraction.

It would be alarming if, say, a murderer, a rapist, or a thief were patted on the back and given a prize. It would be the height of injustice. Even a cannibalistic culture has laws and rules, violations of which have punitive sanctions. Everywhere societies are governed by laws and their designated consequences. The very notion of law implies consequence. And even more generally, as regards nature itself, it would be passing strange if one were to jump off a cliff and fail to fall, or to stand in front of a moving train and not be struck down, or be cut to the bone and not bleed, for everyone intuitively recognizes that there is a law of cause and effect, and that to violate a boundary, whether sacred, social, or natural, is to inexorably bring some form and degree of unpleasant consequence. This law is written into nature by the hand of God, and all societies have some moral and civil version of it. And yet, when it comes to God’s Covenant Law, man thinks that here God will simply ignore His own Word and act in a way that is without reference to His justice, His law, His covenant. The reality, however, is that one of the most pervasive themes of Scripture is God’s keeping of His covenant promises.

-My mercy I will keep for him forever, And My covenant shall stand firm with him. ... 34 My covenant I will not break, Nor alter the word that has gone out of My lips. (Psalm 89:28, 34)

-He remembers His covenant forever, The word which He commanded, for a thousand generations, (Psalm 105:8)

-He has given food to those who fear Him; He will ever be mindful of His covenant. ... 9 He has sent redemption to His people; He has commanded His covenant forever: Holy and awesome is His name. (Psalm 111:5, 9)

To interpose some sophistry here is simply to make God a liar, and in this way PSA is simply describing how God is consistent with His own Covenant promise in His justifying of man in Christ. The fact of nature’s consequences, together with the consequences that ensue from violations of civil law, in light of the reality of God’s being a Covenantal God, all point to the fact that the Creator is not averse to establishing and guaranteeing punitive consequences, and the fact that He promises punishment means that He will not act apart from His own word. For God says of Himself:

-keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation." (Exodus 34:7)

-The LORD is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation. (Numbers 14:18)

-and the curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the LORD your God, but turn aside from the way which I command you today, to go after other gods which you have not known. (Deuteronomy 11:28)

-But it shall come to pass, if you do not obey the voice of the LORD your God, to observe carefully all His commandments and His statutes which I command you today, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you: ... 45 Moreover all these curses shall come upon you and pursue and overtake you, until you are destroyed, because you did not obey the voice of the LORD your God, to keep His commandments and His statutes which He commanded you. (Deuteronomy 28:15, 45)

-27 Then the anger of the LORD was aroused against this land, to bring on it every curse that is written in this book. (Deuteronomy 29:27)

-The earth is polluted by its inhabitants, for they have transgressed teachings, overstepped decrees, and broken the permanent covenant. Therefore a curse has consumed the earth, and its inhabitants have become guilty; the earth's inhabitants have been burned, and only a few survive.  (Isaiah 24:5-6)

-The LORD is slow to anger and great in power, and the LORD will by no means clear the guilty. His way is in whirlwind and storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet. (Nahum 1:3)

-For whoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is guilty of all. (James 2:10)

The foregoing demonstrates that the violation of God’s Law so obviously calls for punitive retribution that it is astonishing that some would deny that there is a punitive and juridical element to God’s Law. It is not possible to honestly read Deuteronomy 28:15-68 and come to the conclusion that God’s justice is not in some sense punitive. Sin must legally, i.e. relative to God’s holy will as revealed in His covenant Law, receive a curse, a punishment, and Christ became that curse (Galatians 3:13) in order to bear the consequence for sin. In other words, sin sets in motion a chain of events that culminate in a just and punitive divine retribution. Therefore, Penal Substitutionary Atonement is an absolutely essential aspect of the Atonement, for without it man’s divinely guaranteed curse and punishment are not dealt with, for either God is a liar and will not keep His Word, in which case nothing can be trusted, or He keeps His Word and Christ pays the punitive debt man owes for sin.

-But in accordance with your hardness and your impenitent heart you are treasuring up for yourself wrath in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God. (Romans 2:5)

-Indeed, let God be true but every man a liar. As it is written: “That You may be justified in Your words, And may overcome when You are judged” (Psalm 51:4 LXX) 5 But if our unrighteousness demonstrates the righteousness of God, what shall we say? Is God unjust who inflicts wrath? (I speak as a man.) 6 Certainly not! For then how will God judge the world? (Romans 3:4-6)

-because the law brings about wrath; for where there is no law there is no transgression. (Romans 4:15)

-Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. (Romans 5:9)

-Because of these things the wrath of God is coming upon the sons of disobedience, (Colossians 3:6)

-and to wait for His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead, even Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come. (1 Thessalonians 1:10)

St. Paul is stating that God will inflict wrath on the unrighteous when He judges the earth, because punishment is what evil necessarily receives as a consequence. This is a fact everyone intuitively knows, as argued above. God is true, and He keeps His Word, and His promise of curse upon sin is no lie. Man’s sin will become the occasion for a display of God’s righteous indignation against all unrighteousness, for “God is a righteous judge, And a God who has indignation every day” (Psalm 7:11). Christ’s entering into time and space, history and geography, family and heritage, Law and Temple, under the conditions of His own Covenant, as a perfect man, therefore entails that the conditions of that Covenant Law are intended by Him to be met by Him, therefore including necessarily its punitive dimension. Being utterly sinless, as He must be in order to fulfill His own Law’s demands, in the Atonement He meets the righteous and punitive demands that fallen man deserves. 

Forensic imputation, as established by God in the Levitical sacrifice of the Day of the Atonement, made the appropriation of man’s curse possible (Leviticus 16). Remembering that the sacrificial system points to and takes its meaning from Christ, being without blemish or spot is a requirement for the Passover lamb who dies in the place of all the first born among the Hebrews (Exodus 12:5). Christ recapitulates in Himself the entire sacrificial system, for it reveals by means of shadow and type His will and method of salvation. The scandal of particularity thus includes the historically contingent aspects of the Covenant Law and Temple Sacrifice that Christ intentionally incorporated into His saving economy because of their relation to His eternal will. In this way, PSA provides an objectivity to the Atonement in its relation to God's Law, which is to say His revealed will and character. For God’s Law is not arbitrary either in its relation to man or in its relation to God Himself.

As has been shown throughout the previous studies, it is a Patristic dictum that God does nothing without justice, and in this way His Law reflects and conforms to an eternal verity, that of God’s own holiness. God, therefore, in saving man will not turn His back on His own Law or the inner logic of its sacrificial system any more than He would turn His back on His own holiness, for that would be for God to act in a way inconsistent with Himself. But God cannot deny Himself (2 Timothy 2:13). Moreover, as said, Christ Himself came to fulfill the Law, even to the very jot and tittle, not circumvent it, and so for God to act apart from His Law would be to make Him out to be a liar, and undermine both the economy and the openly declared purpose of the Incarnation. In this light, PSA demonstrates the internal consistency of God’s harmonious economy in relation to His Covenant. Without PSA, not only are God’s Temple and Law, with their integrated sacrificial system, trivialized and functionally rendered meaningless non-entities, but God Himself is shown to save us in a way that is inconsistent with His own revealed will and character. 

PSA also preserves not only the integrity of the Law and the Sacrifices, but also a high view of the sinfulness of sin, the seriousness with which God thinks of and deals with sin, and the magnitude of His mercy in its unity with His justice. Without PSA, the problem of sin is not dealt with in the terms God Himself established. If this is so, then God is made to be at variance with His own condemnation of sin. Moreover, the Law, the Temple, and the Sacrifices can no longer function meaningfully as shadows and types, and so they can no longer inform the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice if they are dismissed in their essential relation within God’s covenant law and justice. Christ can longer teach from the Law of Moses, the Psalms, and the Prophets that He had to suffer what He suffered (Luke 24:44-47). Denial of PSA thus “demeans” Christ's death and resurrection. That commandments were broken, and why the sacrifices matter, are left irrelevant and unknown. Thus the reality of sin is not dealt with if PSA is denied, for the commandments, the curses on sin, and the sacrifices for sin, the Law and the Temple, are emptied of their binding nature and content, and so the very meaning of Christ’s sacrifice is disjointed and discontinuous from its source in the Old Covenant, the Covenant that God Himself swore to uphold. God, however, promises to remain faithful to His covenant, therefore PSA is necessitated. 

As many observe, matter matters, and this is part of what grounds not only the theology of the icon but also asceticism. According to this same Incarnational principle, it is also true that history matters. God’s work in history thus cannot be marginalized as if the contingent historical dimension of His economy is not an inextricable aspect of its importance. Quite simply, the Old Covenant matters. It is included in the mattering of matter and the scandal of particularity. Christ answered to objective issues that were necessarily responding to God’s transcendental judgments, including the providential conditions established by His will, a will reflected in His holy Law in both its moral and sacrificial aspects. In short, Christ enters into the Letter of the Law. He enters the jot and the tittle. He enters into Scripture's plain Historical sense, for the Incarnation includes “a self-abasement in which he holds enclosed the limits of all history” (St. Maximus the Confessor, Commentary on the Our Father, The Classics of Western Spirituality, pg 102). With His Spirit He fulfills His Letter; as Man He substantiates History and the "plain sense" of His own Word, the Scriptures that He inspired. 

Some will abuse the teachings of Fathers like St. Maximus the Confessor regarding the Letter of Scripture, as if St. Maximus denies its place and importance. Although he certainly gives priority to the Spiritual reading of the Scriptures, it is never in the mode of a blunt denial of its historical meaning but of an incorporative transcendence. To speak of the giving of the Law in a spiritual sense is not to deny that the Law was given. Not holding to the Letter “too tightly” does not then mean holding it too loosely, either: “It is, therefore, very necessary for a deep knowledge that we first study the veils of the statements regarding the Word” (ibid, Chapters on Knowledge, 73, pg 163). Of course, this cannot become a reductive literalism, but it cannot become a reductive allegorism, either, for “the entire Scripture taken as a whole man with the Old Testament as body and the New Testament as spirit and mind” (ibid, The Church’s Mystagogy, ch. 6, pg 195) means that the historical dimension is included, not discluded. 

“Moreover… the historical letter of the entire holy Scripture, Old Testament and New, is a body while the meaning of the letter and the purpose to which it is directed is the soul.” (ibid, 195)

The modern hyperallegorist, however, in true Gnostic fashion, treats the “body” of Scripture as something to despise. Instead of understanding deeply the veil of the Letter in order to enter into the Spirit, he miserably seeks to jump straight to the Spirit as if this can be done by bypassing the Letter. History is scorned, God’s Covenant is despised, and Scripture becomes essentially a disembodied spirit. PSA, therefore, serves to affirm the reality of the Body of the Scriptures, for even if its deepest meaning is not centered in its historical aspect or dimension as such, for God Himself directly apprehended in theoria is the goal, the historical dimension is not thus trivialized, but given its positive and enduring meaning. Christ is not an allegory, and so the allegorical approach to Scripture cannot be so radical that it obviates or cancels out what is plain. 

The Grammomachians, the Letter Fighters, have so spiritualized the Scriptures that one is left to wonder if they think Moses even existed, much less wrote the Torah, or if he really ascended Mt. Sinai and entered into the Cloud, or if it is only a mystical literary device meant to explain the mystical ascent of the nous. They have abused the Fathers in order to turn a valid Patristic allegorical hermeneutic into a kind of fundamentalism of allegory. Somehow the Law, the Temple, and the Sacrifices aren't really legal, cultic, or sacrificial. They are only allegory, imagery, and therapy. As much as one would be suspicious of hyper-literalism, one ought to be equally if not more suspicious of these hyper-allegorists and antiliteralists, these haters of history, for by placing a wedge between the Letter and the Spirit, and between Body and Soul, they pit God against His own Word, His story against history, and sculpt allegory to fit their unbelieving, antinomian, and man-centered inclinations. This is not the Patristic way. The Grammomachians despise the Fathers and deny the Law, the Temple, and History, even though God Himself wrote the Law with His own divine finger, gave Moses the Temple plans in a revelation (Exodus 25:40), and providentially directed the course of history which to this very day He presides over, the very history He entered into in order to save man and vindicate His Word: “That you may be justified in your words, and prevail when you are judged" (Romans 3:4, LXX Psalm 50:4). 

The Letter therefore stands, and also the History, for God wrote and created them both, and entered into history in order to fulfill them both, to every jot and tittle. This guarantees the Scriptures' plain sense and ought to shut forever the mouths of those who pay only lip service to the truth of the Letter and the History. You might demand from them: Did God create the world in six days? Did all the world, save Noah and those with him in the Ark, perish in a global Flood? Did all the firstborn of Egypt die in a divine plague? Did Moses with God's power cleave the Red Sea and walk through on dry land with his fellow Hebrews? Did they wander through the desert for forty years together with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night? Did Uzzah die when he touched the Ark? Was Jonah swallowed by the great fish? Or are they perhaps ashamed of this Letter, and this History? Is it beneath them to believe that these marvelous things really happened? Is God so weak that after creating everything from nothing He cannot but inspire a few quasi-factual allegories and holy legends? Can He write with time, space, and matter, but not with history, miracle, and covenant, and not with Law, Temple, and Sacrifice? For some of these hyper-allegorists not even Christ has risen, for that too is but allegory, meaningful and profound to be sure, but not physically actual, not historical. 

PSA therefore serves as a marker of the objectivity of God's actions in history, the reality of His Covenant Law and the realism of its righteous demands, its blessings and curses, and even its necessity in the face of all its historical contingency. Christ met the judicial, penal sanctions against man. He not only defeated a real devil, and conquered a real death, but He answered to the demands of a real Law and so was a sacrifice according to the logic of its penal code, His own penal code, the one He inspired, becoming a curse, bruised and killed, all according to His Father's and His own single divine will, with which His human will was in perfect agreement, to stand in man's very real place and take on man's very real punishment.

The scandal of sin, and the scandal of the Law, these are at the heart of the scandal of the Cross. The “Greek” thinks this is foolishness. If he can but philosophize about it, if he can make it abstract and Platonic, then it is more palatable. But if it is historical, if the Cross is planted squarely in temporal contingency, and what is more if his eternal fate is bound up with his own response to this “contingent truth of history,” then all of a sudden he squirms. The scandal of particularity that is the historical Jesus dying on a wooden cross implicitly threatens the pride of man’s intellect. Although God can create a world and even enter into it, to make a fact of history binding not only upon the intellect of man but even upon his very existence, this is intolerable to rationalism’s pride. 

To make an eternal destiny depend upon a material fact, such a theologia crucis is too much for the rationalistic man to bear. Lessing tried with his power of subterfuge to persuade man to believe that contingency doesn’t matter. But, contingency matters. Matter matters. History matters. The Covenant matters. Its very fixity frustrates and compels man to seek freedom in eternity, but eternity can only be entered through the historical reality of an old wooden cross. Life ends and begins there again. The past is somehow linked with eternity, and only there, at the Cross, can eternity be touched. It is both contingent and that upon which all other things are contingent; all else is dependent on the Cross, and as the absolute fact it is yet an awfully relative thing. All of eternity is squeezed into and resurrects through that moment. Your life and my life hinge there, hang there, on that singular event, that hour, that place, those circumstances, those wounds. Eternity is contained in the Cross, and it cannot be dislodged from history; it guarantees it. And as such we must look to the Cross; our gaze cannot take it all in, but its historicity is not thereby detachable. The historical, legal, sacrificial, and covenantal circumstances that lead up to it, describe it, and flow therefrom are of the essence of that Cross. It binds all history and all things together into its agonizing simplicity. It is therefore not more profound to ignore the history; it is not an advance upon its truth to scorn the convergence of eternity, space, time, and matter, man, history, future, and eschaton, all together in that holy theater of God’s glorious salvation. 

To escape from the contingent, transcendental realism of the Cross into philosophical reverie and, passing out of time and space, to behold as if climbing up by some other way (cf. John 10:1) the realm of truth, the noumenon, the principles of all things, is merely to behold the face of rotten death. It is only through the phenomenon of the Cross of Christ where a real and eternally living eternity can be touched. Reflection must pass through, not around, the Cross. Its very contingency is made to be the profound refraction of the Triune God’s transcendence. Transcendence has a door by which the sheep may enter. The Cross is the location where that door is found, that historical, tangible, material reality, in all its homely contingency, from which a man is known, the New Man, hanging therefrom, broken, bleeding, and dying according to the very Law He composed and put in place, therein trampling down death by death for the life and salvation of the world. One cannot go around, one must pass through it all in order to glimpse the heavenly reality that shines through matter, the matter that He created in order to bear His historical economia and thus create His eternal Bride, the Church, out of similarly contingent historical people. If we reject this history, then we reject the eternity that hung there, the One who shed His blood in order to give something that not even the universe itself could contain: Himself.

To conclude, PSA speaks to the nature of Christ's historical sacrifice in all its finite contingency and eternal significance, that in terms established by His own Covenant, Christ acted as our legal substitute, and with our sin imputed to Him He acted as a vicarious sacrifice and so resolved the problem not only of man's death, but also of man's sin. He did this in the terms He set up in the Law and in the Temple sacrifices, for these reflect His eternal will and take their meaning, and so are guaranteed their meaning, in Christ’s Cross. Christ “suffered for us and instead of us - that is, in our stead and for our sake - thus fulfilling the relative prophecy of the scapegoat in the Old Testament” (Arsenios Katerelos, The Jesus Prayer and Its Application, pg 64). If the Cross is not penal, i.e. not related to the condemnation of sin that man deserves, if it is internally disconnected from the logic of the Old Covenant Law and Sacrifices, then Christ's Cross, Death, and Resurrection lose the framework of meaning God Himself gave them, and so leave man's sin unatoned for. Since in Christ our sin is forgiven, PSA shows how this is so, how on the Cross the penalty for sin, which is God’s wrath against sin, is dealt with.

-Fr. Joshua Schooping