John Mark Comer and Penal Substitutionary Atonement: The Heart of the Gospel

The cross is our theology.

—Martin Luther, “Lectures on the Psalms”

John Mark Comer is one of the most popular voices in the Christian world today. Formerly a pastor in Portland, Oregon, Comer has become a go-to authority in the Christian spirituality world, picking up the mantle of Dallas Willard, Richard Foster, and John Ortberg. Comer’s appeal is obvious: his style is easygoing and his writing is accessible. The Christianity he champions is a quirky combination of chill vibes, unabashed devotion (he likes rules!), and counter-cultural questioning of orthodoxies.

For my part, I recently read Comer’s book on ruthlessly eliminating “hurry.” Overall, I enjoyed it, as Comer offers some valuable practical guidance in resisting secular pressure. At the same time, numerous features of the book tripped my radar—the heavily ecumenical source-base, the lack of a clear articulation of the gospel and its centrality in evangelical spirituality, and the gestures made toward progressive politics.

John Mark Comer Questions Penal Substitutionary Atonement

I haven’t been entirely sure what to make of Comer’s program. Recently, an Instagram story by Comer made major waves, as Comer cited a 2024 book on the atonement as seemingly “the final biblical/exegetical knockout blow to PSA.” PSA means “penal substitutionary atonement,” the biblical doctrine of the cross that reads Christ as dying in the place of sinners under the penalty of God’s law—bearing the just wrath of God—so that those who have faith in Christ and repent of their sins may know God’s total forgiveness.

PSA has been under fire for generations. Among other reasons, liberal theologians have argued that it teaches a vision of God that reads him as a cosmic child-abuser who pours out unrestrained fury on his Son, Jesus Christ. This bad conception of God, some argue, has enfranchised all manner of evils, including abusive patriarchy, spanking and mistreatment of children, retributive justice and the death penalty, and more.

For these reasons, Comer’s cannonball into the pool surprised many. Prior to the above Instagram story, he had not waded so directly into the debate sketched above. Now, however, Comer has chosen to engage one of the fiercest disagreements in all of Christian theology. He did so by commending a scholarly book by Andrew Rillera entitled Lamb of the Free: Recovering the Varied Sacrificial Understandings of Jesus's Death (Cascade, 2024).

Rillera is assistant professor of biblical studies and theology at The King’s University in Edmonton, Alberta. Previously, he wrote a book called Fight with Preston Sprinkle, making a case for pacifism (Sprinkle is “progressive” in different respects, arguing—for example—that the experience of same-sex attraction is not a sin.) Rillera’s latest book is no peace offering, however; it is a haymaker in the direction of PSA, as we shall see.

Evaluating Lamb of the Free

What does Lamb of the Free argue? In this humble essay, I won’t try to map an exhaustive answer. In what follows, I will quote from a number of Rillera’s arguments. In the next section, I will give an overview response. Here, then, is a rapid ten-part tour of some of the core content of Lamb of the Free.

First, Rillera aims to prove that Old Testament sacrifice is not about wrath or punishment of sin.

The key point for us to grasp in this preliminary discussion is that this careful, historical work by Milgrom, along with those who argue like him, exposes the fact that the set of equations at the heart of the PSA model is, quite simply, untrue. The practice and logic of OT sacrifice has nothing to do with substitution, retribution, or punishment (i.e., negative retribution). Neither is it supplying a universal account of justice. The mechanism, logic, and concerns of OT sacrifice are completely different. (20)

Second, he believes that this relates to God’s character:

We must press, that is, more deeply into a God of love, not retribution; into a God who eschews violence, rather than practicing it proportionately; and into a gospel rooted in divine benevolence and covenant, not in retribution and contract. (22)

Third, Rillera argues that historic evangelical atonement theology produces bad results:

I hope to be a family that cultivates a shared life that is “free” from the fear-based and pseudo-justice of so many theologies of “atonement” that pass as “Christian,” but that actually nurture antichrist authoritarian household environments. Rather, we strive, with the Lamb’s help, to be participants in the broken body and shed blood of the Lamb for the life of the world. (28)

Fourth, Rillera argues that the Bible teaches the “participation” theory of atonement:

By way of conclusion, I directly address the notion of “substitution.” By this point, it will have become more than clear that the NT authors, whether they make use of sacrificial imagery, or whether they make use of the atoning sacrifices, all agree on one fundamental point: Jesus’s death is a participatory phenomenon; it is something all are called to share in experientially. The logic is not: Jesus died so we don’t have to. Rather it is: Jesus died so that we, together, can follow in his steps and die with him and like him, having full fellowship with his sufferings so that we might share in the likeness of his resurrection(e.g., Phil 3:10–11; Gal 2:20; 6:14; Rom 6:3–8; 1 Pet 2:21; Mark 8:34–35 with 10:38–29; 1 John 2:6; 3:16–18; etc.). In short, while Jesus did die for us, this does not mean that Jesus died instead of us. It means that he died ahead of and with us. (38)

Fifth—and this is big—Rillera reconceives numerous OT sacrifices:

(1) There is no such thing as a “substitutionary death” sacrifice in the Torah. (2) The hand-laying ritual is not saying “this is me; this is my substitute,” but rather, “this is mine; I own this and I’m giving it to God [for various distinct purposes].” (3) Sacrificial slaughter is itself not focused on the biological death of the animal. Sacrificial slaughter is separated from any notion of simply being a “death” and it is explicitly reconceptualized via specific ritual actions as something other than a killing of a blood-bearing creature. (4) Sacrificial slaughter is not at all about making the animal “suffer” (let alone suffer as a substitute). (43)

Sixth, in the New Testament, the cross is about “solidarity,” not substitution:

It is also worth pausing to note that Jesus repeatedly tells his disciples that they are called to follow him along the same way (Matt 10:38; 16:24; 20:22–23; Mark 8:34; 10:38–39; Luke 9:23; 14:27; John 12:24–26; 13:16–17, 36; 15:18, 20; 16:1–4; 21:18–22). This conception of Jesus’s death is not a substitution from any angle. Jesus did not die “instead of” Jerusalem, since it is still going to be destroyed. Jesus did not die “instead of” the disciples, who will still brought to trial and some of them killed. Jesus goes the way of Jerusalem’s destruction on the cross and Jesus’s disciples follow the way of the cross as they pick up their own. This is about solidarity, not substitution. According to the Gospels, Jesus is not dying instead of anyone, let alone his disciples, but rather, ahead of them. He is the one who pioneers the way through death and into indestructible resurrection life, moral purification, the forgiveness of sins, and the establishment of the new eschatological covenant. (276)

Seventh, the Lord’s Supper is a memorial celebration of “divine liberation”:

But this does not mean that either the Passover or the covenant-inaugurating sacrifice being activated at the Lord’s Supper themselves are suddenly taking on a “forgiveness” or a kipper function. Rather, they are, like all other well-being sacrifices (especially the thanksgiving sacrifice), memorializing and celebrating an act of divine liberation. And these events of divine deliverance were not accomplished via a well-being sacrifice. Rather, they are commemorated and memorialized by these sacrificial feasts. (293)

Eighth, language about “taking away sins” is about God’s patience, not atoning sacrifice:

In the other Torah passages, the phrase “takes away sin(s)” are all about God removing Israel’s sins, i.e., putting up with their disobedience, after they leave Egypt (Exod 34:7, 9; Num 14:18 [notice v. 19 “from Egypt until now”]). Right after the relationship between God and Israel is established—celebrated with the Passover and sealed in the covenant-making ceremony—Israel worships the golden calf at the foot of Sinai (Exod 32). This is the context of the first use of this phrase, which anchors Moses’s hope that God will listen to his prayer for Israel and God will take away their grave sin of idolatry (34:7, 9). Then after they depart Sinai, the people start complaining and rebelling right away and continually (Num 11–21 contains seven episodes of this).534 Numbers 14:18 occurs in middle of these episodes and it becomes apparent that “taking away sins” becomes a necessary thing for God to do if the people are not going to be totally abandoned or destroyed in the wilderness. But, importantly, this “taking away of sins” in both Num 14 and Exod 34 happens quite apart from the sacrificial system. This is just the prerogative of God because there are no atoning sacrificial remedies for these deliberates acts of rebellion... (301)

Ninth, “forgiveness of sins” means release from the consequences of moral impurity:

The theme of “forgiveness of sins” in the NT is anchored in the prophetic texts that promise a specific sort of forgiveness of sins: Israel’s release from the consequences of moral impurity (exile as covenant death, e.g., Ezek 37), which will be celebrated as a new exodus (hence Passover) and establishing/re-affirming God’s (re)new(ed) covenant (exile as covenant death, e.g., Ezek 37). Neither the Jesus-as-Passover lamb nor Jesus-as-blood-of-the-(re)new(ed)-covenant effects this forgiveness. Rather, these sacrificial feasts are sacrificialized in the Lord’s Supper to commemorate that the promised forgiveness of sins has already happened apart from any “sacrifice” (atoning or non-atoning). Jesus was literally offering this forgiveness prior to his death because the forgiveness he offers springs from the fact that “the time is fulfilled” (Mark 1:15)—it is the time of God’s promised forgiveness—and that he is God’s “mobile, and powerfully contagious force of holiness in the world . . . that overwhelms the forces and sources of impurity and death, be they pneumatic, ritual, or moral.” (313)

Tenth, the work of Christ is participatory, calling us to walk faithfully with Jesus in suffering:

Therefore, as it turns out, Jesus’s high priesthood is not substitutionary. Rather, it is something we are enabled to participate in because it grants us access to the heavenly holy of holies, which it seems Jesus will be bringing with him when he returns (9:28; 10:34, 37; 11:10, 16; 12:22, 27–28; 13:14). (363)

Believers are so intimately connected with Jesus that their suffering “belongs” to Jesus—it is “his reproach.” Their suffering is his suffering. This is as clear of a statement of total solidarity and participation as it is profound. (365)

What is clear in Hebrews, though, is that Jesus’s death is not an act of substitution. The audience is not supposed to look at Jesus’s sufferings and death and think: “Phew! Jesus did all of that instead of me!” Rather, they are “to look upon Jesus, the author and perfector of faithfulness” (12:2) and thereby pattern their lives after the crucifixion, bearing his reproach, realizing that Jesus suffered and died ahead of them rather than instead of them (12:2–4; 10:32–39; 11:25–26, 36–38). Jesus’s suffering and death is what determines what faithfulness and obedience mean (5:8; 10:7, 9) while the wilderness generation provides the antitype (3:18–19; 4:2–3, 6, 11). (368)

Moreover, according to Hebrews, Jesus not only decontaminates the heavenly sanctuary, his consecrating life-blood also grants believers access to God in the holy of holies, indexing them as co-high priests, and enables them to participate with Jesus as co-purgation sacrifices enveloped in the same single purgation sacrifice Jesus is and offers. This understanding of atonement (in the sense of kipper) is not about Jesus dying “instead of” us, but rather about Jesus’s death and resurrection making it possible for us to pattern our own lives after him in union with his suffering and death and to participate in his resurrection. This is a participatory atonement (kipper) theology. (371)

A Response to Andrew Rillera (and John Mark Comer)

Just two months before Rillera’s Lamb of the Free debuted in March 2024, I had a book come out. It’s entitled The Warrior Savior: A Theology of the Work of Christ (P&R). In what follows, I will present material adapted (and expanded upon) from The Warrior Savior that directly relates to some of Rillera’s claims, including commentary from several of Christianity’s most faithful theologians.

First Truth: God Is the One Who Is Wronged by Sin

While I recognize real scholarly ability in Rillera, I cannot mince words: my disagreement with him is entire. It is whole-cloth disagreement. I say this because Rillera and I read the Bible in fundamentally different and irreconcilable terms. Essentially, Rillera removes atonement (as it is rightly understood) from the biblical narrative, gutting biblical sacrifices of their core character.

In the Bible, our personal sin must be dealt with because it offends God personally. This is true from the jump: when Adam and Eve sin against God, God shows up personally (Genesis 3:1-13). He pronounces judgment on the serpent (first), the woman, and then the man. This is extremely important material, for it shows that when we sin, we are not only transgressing the holy standard; we are blaspheming and rebelling against God himself.

This is the background and framework of all divine-human interaction in Scripture (and history). No person can remove himself or herself from the theocentric dimension of human existence. Genesis 2-3 shows us in unmistakable terms that we are made by God, we are ruled by God, we rebel against God, and we will be judged by God. The Scripture presents sin in these terms from the start to the finish of the Bible.

Rillera’s project does grapple with sin and uncleanness and forgiveness, to be sure. But it guts the God-human relationship of its retributive and restorative character. In biblical terms, the fall is a holistic fall, entailing a change of nature; similarly, forgiveness through sacrifice is holistic forgiveness, rendering people gloriously free from the judgment of God they (we!) so clearly deserve.

Second Truth: God Is the One Who Makes Atonement

God, then, is just. In a world of fallenness, this means that God is not only displeased with sin, desiring “decontamination” (a key word for Rillera’s project). No, God burns against sin. The wrath of God is real and terrible (Romans 1:18; Ephesians 2:3). The only hope for humanity is to be rescued from this just punishment, which stretches far beyond this life into eternity.

Here, then, is amazing news: God does not leave us in our sin. God shows up. God comes near. In Genesis 3, after Adam and Eve run from God by trusting the serpent’s antirevelation, God does not abandon them. God calls them to account, but then God speaks a word to the serpent. While the smoke is still rising from the fall, God promises to send a Warrior-Deliverer on behalf of the woman’s seed (Gen. 3:15). This heroic figure will not only battle the serpent’s seed, but defeat it.

We must read this as a sign of God’s fatherly love. God protects his people from their sworn enemy. God acts when all that Adam and Eve know to do is hide. God intervenes. Not only this: God clothes the man and the woman in animal skins, prefiguring justification by faith alone. From that point forward, God ensures that the woman’s seed endures and even thrives in the midst of great peril and hardship. The standard to which the people are called is a high one indeed; as God shows Abraham, nothing can be held back from the Lord, for the Lord will hold no good thing back from his chosen.

God over and over again reveals that he loves and protects and delivers his people. In the Passover and the exodus, we find an early expression of the glorious dynamics of atonement theology: Israel’s sins are passed over, and God gives the passed-over people victory over—and deliverance from —their Egyptian enemies. We see a similar effect in play in the atonement ceremonies of Leviticus. God makes sinners clean through blood sacrifice and, at the height of this system, both accepts a ram’s blood and releases the scapegoat into the wilderness, signifying the complete removal of Israel’s iniquity that is provisionally realized in the old covenant era—and that will one day come to perfect fruition in the Lamb.

The Old Testament teaches blood atonement for sin. All this comes to culmination in the perfect atoning sacrifice foretold in Isaiah 53. No bull or goat will suffice. The personal God calls out a personal sufferer, the Suffering Servant, in order to make full and final atonement for sin. No committee appoints the Servant to this task; it is the will of Yahweh to send this figure to die for his people (Isaiah 53:10).

As is true all throughout the Old Testament and the Bible more broadly, God is the one who takes initiative to save, deliver, and heal. Only God can save; only God acts to save. The redemption that God effects, furthermore, is no trifling redemption, but is the costliest sacrifice possible. We conclude the point by citing Leon Morris:

…in both Testaments the thought is plain that the gift which secures the propitiation is from God Himself. He provides the way whereby men may come to Him. Thus the use of the concept of propitiation witnesses to two great realities, the one, the reality and the seriousness of the divine reaction against sin, and the other, the reality and the greatness of the divine love which provided the gift which should avert the wrath from men. (Leon Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, Third Ed., Eerdmans, 210–11)

Third Truth: The Depth of God’s Love for Us Is Portrayed in Christ’s Cross

Scripture reveals that the same God who judges sin loves his people “with an everlasting love” ( Jer. 31:3). In the Bible, we learn that God is not only willing to forgive because of his great love for us, but that God delights to forgive because of his great love for us. Even in our lowest moments, in fact, God is not quick to anger. As Moses learned, the Lord is a God “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,” a God who keeps “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” (Ex. 34:6–7).

Here is some truly wondrous truth: this is not love that is dependent on us, ultimately. This is not love that gets turned off rapidly like a faucet wrenched by a raging overlord. This is the love of a heavenly Father. It is love so great and joyous that it inspires us to run hard after God. We do not strive to obey God out of grim joylessness or rote duty; we strive to obey our gracious heavenly Father because, in response to his love, we love him.

His love compels our love in the gladdest possible sense (2 Cor. 5:14). Our actions all matter to God, but at the end of the day, God’s love is not dependent on us. God’s love is dependent on God. This is why it endures; this is why it continues; this is why we do not lose our salvation; this is why, once we are born again, our sin can never be unatoned for. God’s love owes to what God wills, not what we do.

So for believers, love is not an abstract category. Love is not defined by speculative philosophy or human wisdom. Love is defined by God, and love at its peak in the world that God has made is shown and offered in the cross of Christ. God shows us love at its height in the cross as the Father gives up his Son to death under judgment for us, and the Son does not flinch but dies for us under just penalty in our place. We hear J. I. Packer on this count:

The penal substitution model has been criticized for depicting a kind Son placating a fierce Father in order to make him love man, which he did not do before. The criticism is, however, inept, for penal substitution is a Trinitarian model, for which the motivational unity of Father and Son is axiomatic. The New Testament presents God’s gift of his Son to die as the supreme expression of his love to men. … And the two loves, the love of Father and Son, are one: a point that the penal substitution model, as used, firmly grasps. (J. I. Packer, “What Did the Cross Achieve? The Logic of Penal Substitution,” in J. I. Packer and Mark Dever, In My Place Condemned He Stood: Celebrating the Glory of the Atonement, Crossway, 2008), 93–94)

As Packer is at pains to say, the cross is the visible display in history, in time and space, of the love of God. But it is not an impersonal cross. It is a cross borne for us. It is thus an objective reality that shapes our subjective experience. It does not speak to us of a limited forgiveness; the cross speaks to us through nearly two thousand years of history of complete forgiveness, perfect forgiveness, forgiveness to the uttermost. It is forgiveness seen both in the shedding of blood and in the resulting departure of the Scapegoat into utter darkness on behalf of the covenant people of God.

All this clarifies what is lost in projects like the one Rillera constructs. If we remove the wrath-forgiveness dynamic from the cross, we have no cross at all. But we do not only lose retributive justice and crucial teaching on the character of God; we lose love. Biblical love at its apex does not only modify and tweak; biblical love at its apex satisfies, cleanses, redeems, buys back from bondage—in a phrase, secures complete and total forgiveness through the death of an innocent substitute.

Fourth Truth: We Have Victory over Sin, Satan, the World, and Hell

Rillera rightly references the victory of God over the powers of darkness in his book. But in rejecting PSA, he tragically loses the very engine that accomplishes the triumph of God over Satan. (This same problem recurs in Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion; Rutledge is right about Christ’s victory over the powers, but fails to situate this cosmic win in PSA.) We can say it this way: in the cross of Christ, Jesus the Warrior-Savior has kept the head-crushing promise. Genesis 3:15 is fulfilled. The power of Satan is broken because Jesus the Prophet, Priest, and King atones for the sin of God’s elect.

This means that we who love Scripture do not choose between PSA and Christus Victor (the triumph of Christ over the devil). In our atonement theology, we recognize that the forgiveness of sin through the blood of Christ is precisely what accomplishes our liberation from the forces of evil. At Calvary, Jesus dies as a penal substitutionary sacrifice, and thus propitiates the wrath of God and cleanses the guilty. There is a powerful logic at play here: atonement accomplishes liberation.

This means that the church is a victory people. The victory of God over the devil has yet to be finalized, as it will be on the last day, but it is nevertheless a completed victory. It is also a multidimensional victory. It has implications for every area of our life. For starters, the power of sin is broken by the cross (Rom. 6:6–7). We are no longer enslaved to sin, thanks to the work of Christ. Our fleshly desires still pull at us, but they have no mastery of us.

The power of Satan is broken as well (Hebrews 2:14-18). As noted, Satan cannot successfully accuse us of unatoned sin, nor can Satan wield the power of the fear of death over us. Jesus has died, and in that death we believers discover the death of death, to draw on John Owen once more. In line with this, the world and its evil spiritual powers that prey on us and brutalize us have lost their hold over us (Colossians 2:13-15).

Therefore, we believers are not part of the world any longer in terms of the deadened spiritual order of this fallen realm. Our sins are atoned for, and we are a resurrection people (see 1 Corinthians 15). All this is entailed by the penal substitutionary atonement of Christ. Take away PSA, and the victory I have just sketched—in both objective and subjective dimensions—is wholly and tragically lost.

Fifth Truth: There Is No Redemption or Victory in “Participation”

As I covered above, all of Rillera’s scholarly inquiry in Lamb of the Free bears down on this crystallizing argument: Jesus’ death is not about substitution. It is about “solidarity” with sinners that leads to us walking out faithfulness in a Christ-shaped way. I quoted several passages above that represent this view; here is one of the most strenuous.

What is clear in Hebrews, though, is that Jesus’s death is not an act of substitution. The audience is not supposed to look at Jesus’s sufferings and death and think: “Phew! Jesus did all of that instead of me!” Rather, they are “to look upon Jesus, the author and perfector of faithfulness” (12:2) and thereby pattern their lives after the crucifixion, bearing his reproach, realizing that Jesus suffered and died ahead of them rather than instead of them (12:2–4; 10:32–39; 11:25–26, 36–38). Jesus’s suffering and death is what determines what faithfulness and obedience mean (5:8; 10:7, 9) while the wilderness generation provides the antitype (3:18–19; 4:2–3, 6, 11). (368)

This is remarkable material. It shows us that Rillera’s project, for all its treatment of ancient sources, leads to a very modern liberal claim: the cross is a model of the Christian life. The cross is not propitiatory; the cross does not atone for our sins; the cross is instead a vibrant display of obedience unto death that we should emulate.

As I argue in The Warrior Savior, it is in fact quite true that the atonement exemplifies and actualizes obedience (see 1 Peter 2:21, for example). However, this is not the heart of the atonement; the heart of the atonement is Jesus dying as a propitiatory sacrifice in our place. Jesus satisfied the wrath of God for us in order that we would be completely forgiven of all our sins and thus know only the love of God (and never a single drop of his wrath!) for all eternity.

This is why the cross is such surpassing good news. This is also why penal substitutionary atonement is the heart of the gospel. Without it, in fact, there is no gospel. Sadly, we see exactly how this is so in Rillera’s project. The cross does not accomplish our redemption; rather, it functions to show believers how to “pattern their lives after the crucifixion.” After all that work, spanning hundreds of pages and dense footnotes, Rillera has left us squarely in the territory of Christus Exemplar or, perhaps, the Moral Influence theory of the atonement. Said differently, we’ve come so far just to not come far at all.

Contra Rillera (and with all due respect), the cross is not simply a call to patterned participation. The cross is, as we have said, God saving us from God. In saying this, we do not mean that God is unhinged and out of control in his justice. This is a caricature of PSA. (Where such a vision has been used to enfranchise abuse or evil parenting, by the way, that is genuinely wicked and worthy of repudiation in the strongest terms.)

No, the God who is wrathful against sin is a God who is completely under control. The judgment of God is precisely calibrated. The God who enacts retributive justice is a God of the fairest fairness; he truly could not be fairer. His fairness is a tremendous blessing to us, just as it is a massive common grace gift that evil is punished in this world (including the death penalty for heinous sins). All this is dependent on God; indeed, we only know justice in this life because the biblical God is perfect holy and therefore perfectly just.

But this is not ultimately what the cross displays. The ultimate message of the cross is love. It is not cheap love; it is love in its most costly expression. It is love in its most beautiful form. The God who is justly angry at our sin is the very same God who, throughout the entirety of the biblical narrative, offers sacrificial atonement so that he can drench his people in covenant love. These sacrificial provisions are all provisional until the cross, at which point our forgiveness is wholly and irreversibly secured.

Writing on propitiation, Stott said it well some years ago:

Why is a propitiation necessary? The pagan answer is because the gods are bad-tempered, subject to moods and fits, and capricious. The Christian answer is because God’s holy wrath rests on evil. There is nothing unprincipled, unpredictable or uncontrolled about God’s anger; it is aroused by evil alone. …it would be hard to exaggerate the differences between the pagan and the Christian views of propitiation. In the pagan perspective, human beings try to placate their bad-tempered deities with their own paltry offerings. According to the Christian revelation, God’s own great love propitiated his own holy wrath through the gift of his own dear Son, who took our place, bore our sin and died our death. Thus God gave himself to save us from himself. (John R. W. Stott, The Message of Romans: God’s Good News for the World, IVP, 2001, 115)

Stott is entirely correct. PSA—with propitiation at the core—does not give us a brutal picture of an unsavory God. PSA shows us that the biblical God is the one who upholds every last scintilla of his justice in order that he might bestow his eternal love on sinners like us. The God of PSA is not a tyrant or a miserly court official; the God of PSA is a living wonder, a being too generous for the natural mind to imagine, a God who draws near to sinners and then never draws away from them.

Shocking as it is, some people actually think that moralizing “participation” is better than the conception of the cross mapped here. In truth, a cross that only calls for us to “participate” in the life of Christ is no cross at all. It is a cross emptied of its power. It gives us no Savior worth trusting, emulating, or following. It is a mere model of good behavior, an atonement that leaves us lost in our sins, scraping up our best efforts at obeying Jesus, always striving but never arriving at the place where the love of God overflows without boundary or limit: the place where Jesus suffers and bleeds and dies under the weight of divine reckoning, broken for us.

Conclusion

In conclusion, penal substitutionary theology is not what is wrong with the world. Understood rightly, penal substitutionary theology is what has healed the world, securing atonement for our sins and putting the down-payment of God on the cosmos he created. The atonement, understood biblically, does not obscure the love of God. The atonement, more than any other act in history, reveals the love of God (1 John 4:9-10).

So we see that the propitiatory cross of Christ is a rushing fountain of love. All who find in themselves great rivers of sin may look to it, know its forgiving message, and discover in it power for godliness accessed through the Spirit that lasts for all their days. Challenges to PSA have come, are now coming, and will come. But this has no effect on the true people of God. The cross, after all, is not merely a small part of our theology.

The cross, as Luther said so well, is our theology.

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Further resources on the cross and PSA:

D. A. Carson, “Atonement in Romans 3:21-26,” from The Glory of the Atonement, ed. Charles E. Hill and Frank James III (accessible here: https://media.thegospelcoalition.org/documents/carson/2004_atonement_in_Rom_3.21-26.pdf_)

Steve Jeffery, Michael Ovey, and Andrew Sach, Pierced for Our Transgressions: Rediscovering the Glory of Penal Substitution (Wheaton: Crossway, 2007)

Leon Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965)

J. I. Packer, “Introductory Essay,” in John Owen, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, Repr. ed. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1999)