Popular alternatives to penal substitution
If you have followed me to this point, a question will, I suspect, have been pressing upon you with growing and exasperated insistence – especially if you are acquainted with the extensive existing literature on the atonement.
Do I not realize, you will be asking, that I am not the only Christian out there out with ‘issues’ over penal substitution? And do I not realize that there already exist certain well-rehearsed responses and well-trodden paths of argument, widely accepted by Christian apologists outside the sphere of die-hard Evangelicalism, some of them with impact even on Evangelical mainstreamers such as Nicki Gumbel? And why, if I am indeed aware of such responses, does my own alternative account not at least mention them?
So, let me begin by reassuring you that, yes, I do indeed realize. And that, if I have waited this point to respond to the views of other people, it has not been ignorance or intellectual arrogance on my part. My own priority in this piece, reflected in my order of presentation, has been to offer something I personally find positive and useful to puzzled non-believers and hard-pressed apologists: not, in other words, to undermine explanations that others have found convincing in a manner that might unsettle the faith of sincere believers.
But now is perhaps the moment to say something more about these other accounts.
First, however, I wish to assure you that the account preferred here, and set out in preceding pages, is not one of my own devising. The sacrifice-centred account exists, and has always existed, even if it hasn’t been the account most frequently favoured by the atonement literature over recent years. It is exemplified by studies to which I referred earlier: F.C.N. Hicks, The Fullness of Sacrifice (1930); Frances Young, Sacrifice and the Death of Christ (1975); Godfrey Ashby, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Purpose (1988); John Moses, The Sacrifice of God (1992); Bruce Chilton, The Temple of Jesus (1992); Ian Bradley, The Power of Sacrifice (1995); John Dunnill, Sacrifice and the Body (2013).
Outside the atonement literature you will also find this account well represented in studies of liturgy and the Eucharist. Naturally, liturgical scholars will stray into the domain of theology where their interest extends to meaning as well as the form of the eucharistic ritual. And it will be no surprise (given the importance of the Eucharist for the correct understanding of Christian sacrifice) that the result is always a sacrifice-centred account of the Christ-event, closely akin to what we find in F.C.N. Hicks et al.. So, to the above list of sources for our sacrifice-centred account, I would add certain studies focussed primarily on liturgical concerns: Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum (1939); Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (1945; Louis Bouyer, Eucharist (1966); Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist (1987); Edward Kilmartin, The Eucharist in the West (1988); Robert Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled (2009); Eugene Schlesinger, Sacrificing the Church (2019).
The Catholic bias of this second list no doubt reflects the importance of the ‘mass’ in Roman Catholicism. I believe it also points to an inherent advantage Catholic theologians enjoy over many of their Protestant Evangelical counterparts when it comes to soteriology (i.e. the understanding of salvation). Penal substitution is not, of course, a doctrine exclusive to Protestantism. But Catholic theologians who are dissatisfied with that doctrine yet retain an adequate understanding of Eucharist – as a sacrifice – have at their disposal at least the basis of an alternative, and better, theological doctrine. The particularly vehement nature of the atonement debate in Protestant Evangelical circles may reflect the absence from their theology of this liturgical reference. If I am right that penal substitution doctrine is the substitute for a proper understanding of the eucharistic sacrifice, then we may have an explanation both for the impassioned adherence to that doctrine among conservatives with no decent eucharistic theology to fall back on, and the inadequacy of the main alternatives proposed by their Protestant Evangelical opponents.