An important part of systematic theology is the worldview that must be applied to the contemporary generation. D. A. Carson made this comment on this distinction between biblical theology and systematic theology:
Systematic theology tends to be a little further removed from the biblical text than does biblical theology, but a little closer to cultural engagement. Biblical theology tends to seek out the rationality and communicative genius of each literary genre; systematic theology tends to integrate the diverse rationalities in its pursuit of a large-scale, worldview-forming synthesis. In this sense, systematic theology tends to be a culminating discipline; biblical though it is a worthy end in itself, tends to be a bridge discipline.[1]
In today’s culture, church leaders need employ systematic theology for, as Carson just indicated, “cultural engagement.” Theologians must defend what Spurgeon called “the old doctrine of substitutionary sacrifice” and “the propitiation for sin” using the full weight of Scripture.
German liberal theologians in the 18th and 19th century rejected the penal substitutionary atonement of Christ. The debate over the atonement continued into the 20th century.[2] J. I. Packer credited C. H. Dodd with sparking anew this debate in 1935[3] when he argued that the result of Christ’s atonement was the expiation of the sinner’s sin: Where words of the ἱλαστήριον [hilasterion or propitiation] class do not render כפר [kpr or atonement] and its derivatives, everywhere, except in four cases last considered [Ps. 106 (105) :30; Zech. 7:2; 8:22; Mai. 1:9.] They render words which fall into one or other of two classes: (i) with human subject, "to cleanse from sin or defilement", "to expiate"; (ii) with divine subject, "to be gracious", "to have mercy", "to forgive". It is noteworthy that in rendering words of the second class the passive and middle are used interchangeably.[4]
The other conclusion of Dodd’s research was that the result of Christ’s atonement was not the propitiation of God’s wrath: Dodd concluded "that the LXX translators did not regard כפר (when used as a religious term) as conveying the sense of propitiating the Deity."[5] Following Dodd’s rejection of penal substitution, a number of conservative theologians defended penal substitution. A. M. Hunter in 1954 in his Interpreting Paul’s Gospel writing about Galatians 3:13, said:
“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us.” (I interpose here my own comment, that Paul’s aorist participle is explaining the method of redemption, answering the question “how did Christ redeem us?” and might equally well therefore be translated “by becoming a curse for us”.) The curse is the divine condemnation of sin which leads to death. To this curse we lay exposed; but Christ on his cross identified himself with the doom impending on sinners that, through his act, the curse passes away and we go free. Such passages show the holy love of God taking awful issue in the Cross with the sin of man. Christ, by God’s appointing, dies the sinner’s death, and so removes sin. Is there a simpler way of saying this than that Christ bore our sins? We are not fond nowadays of calling Christ’s suffering “penal” or of styling him our “substitute”; but can we avoid using some such words as these to express Paul’s view of the atonement?[6]
Though Leon Morris is going to disagree with C. H. Dodd on many points, he wrote favorably concerning one truth Dodd held but then stated his disagreement on another issue:
It is a relief to know that we have solid grounds for our conviction that the God of the Bible is not a Being who can be propitiated after the fashion of a pagan deity .... The Bible writers have nothing to do with pagan conceptions of a capricious and vindictive deity, inflicting arbitrary punishments on offending worshippers, who must then bribe him back to a good mood by the appropriate offering. Dodd’s important work makes this abundantly clear ... but Dodd seems to say that all ideas of wrath and propitiation are absent from it.[7]
Morris correctly appraised Dodd’s view. Dodd in his commentary on Romans, validated Morris’ statement. On Romans 1:18, Dodd wrote,
But God’s anger is revealed from heaven. The tense again is the continuous present. A process is going on before our eyes---the revelation of the Wrath of God. I should prefer to keep the old translation here, because such an archaic phrase suits a thoroughly archaic idea .... The Greek word (orge) does, indeed, mean ‘anger’; but God’s anger suggests the simple anthropomorphic idea that God is angry with men, and Paul’s idea is not so simple.[8]
Morris argued, “that the Old Testament writers were sure of a wrath of God extended towards all sin.”[9] After thoroughly documenting with biblical references from all the sections of the Old Testament, Morris concluded: “From these and many other examples it is clear that in the Old Testament the anger of God may be expected to be visited upon the perpetrator of any sin.”[10] Morris also listed the “effects of this wrath ... which show that the Lord is angry”... with “such things as affliction in general (Ps. lxxxviii.7), or specific evils such as pestilence (Ezk. xiv.19) ... slaughter (Ezk. ix. 8), destruction (Ezk. v. 15) ... drought (Dt. xi. 17), and plague (2 Sa. xxiv. 1ff).”[11]
Dodd instead had advocated only an impersonal cause and effect in the Old Testament that caused disasters:
Thus in the oldest parts of the Old Testament, the anger of Jehovah displays itself in thunder, earthquake, pestilence, and the like. The prophets took up this idea, but rationalized it by teaching that disaster is not an outbreak of irresponsible anger, but an expression of the outraged justice of God. There is no disaster but deserved disaster. Thus ‘the Wrath of God’ is taken out of the sphere of the purely mysterious, and brought into the sphere of cause and effect: sin is the cause, disaster is the effect.[12]
Morris refuted this playing down of God’s personal response to sin:
The punishment consequent on sin is just as much due to God as is in all of life. “Shall evil befall a city, and the Lord hath not done it?” (Am. iii.6) .... While disaster is regarded as the inevitable result of man’s sin, it is so in the view of the Old Testament, not by some inexorable law of an impersonal Nature, but because a holy God wills to pour out the vials of His wrath upon those who commit sin.[13]
Morris also was glad to state “the ways in which the wrath of God is said to be averted.”[14] Again, he documented this point with multiple Old Testament references. Morris concludes this section:
This thinking reaches its climax in the passages where the removal of divine wrath is ascribed to God Himself. Thus Ps. lxxviii. 38 tells us that ‘many a time turned he his anger away, and did not stir up all his wrath’, and in Is. xlviii. 9 we read the words of the Lord, “For my name’s sake will I defer mine anger, and for my praise will I refrain for thee, that I cut thee not off.”[15]
Morris concluded his arguments:
Thus our conviction that hilaskomai and its cognates include as an integral part of their meaning the turning away of wrath rests partly on the examination of the occurrences of these words in the Septuagint, and partly on the fact that, quite apart from the words themselves, there is a formidable body of evidence that the wrath of God was a conception to be reckoned with on the Old Testament view.[16]
The battle and debate over penal substitution continued into the late twentieth century. Part of the Conservative Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention was over penal substitution. Baptist historian Jason G. Duesing wrote that at “the height of the Southern Baptist Convention's Inerrancy Controversy (1979-2000), SBC theologians Paige Patterson and Fisher Humphreys consented to a debate over the nature of the atonement at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in 1987.”[17]
Patterson in the debate quoted from Humphrey’s book The Death of Christ, “Men today do not ordinarily hold this view of God as simply willing right or wrong, and so they cannot believe that vicarious punishment is either meaningful or moral. No illustration can be given, so far as I can tell, which makes vicarious punishment morally credible to men today.”[18]
Patterson then provided an extensive examination of biblical texts supporting the penal substitution view before he concluded by saying that the jury is still out with regard to whether Humphreys believes that penal substitution is the "major motif for understanding the atonement in the word of God."[19]
Albert Mohler gave his perspective on the importance of this debate over penal substitution:
The Conservative Resurgence in the SBC sought a theological recovery in the denomination and a rejection of the inroads that theological liberalism had made within its schools. A denial of penal substitution was the goal; the goal was its recovery as the Bible's central message about the cross of Christ. At stake was the New Testament's central concern in revealing a theology of the cross: "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures" (1 Cor 15:3-4). At stake is the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the central message of the Scriptures, whenever the penal substitution accomplished by him is questioned, much less denied.[20]
James Beilby and Paul R. Eddy in their book The Nature of Atonement: Four Views represented the continuing debate about penal substitution. In this book, Thomas R. Schreiner defended penal substitution. All of the other views rejected penal substitution. Gregory Boyd defended the Christus Victor View and rejected penal substitution. Joel B. Green defended the Kaleidoscopic View and rejected penal substitution. Bruce Reichenbach defended the Healing view and rejected penal substitution. Schreiner noted that “Penal substitution is an object of indignation and regularly pilloried by many of the educated class .... Even in the evangelical camp there is the claim that penal substitution is ‘cosmic child abuse’ and contrary to the love of God.”[21] As an example of the cosmic child abuse accusation, Schreiner refers to Steve Chalke who makes this charge in his The Lost Message of Jesus.[22] But Schreiner added that “D. A. Carson shows the astonishing weaknesses in
Chalke’s claim, so that what he says about penal substitution does not qualify as serious scholarship.”[23] Scholars like Schreiner and Carson are engaging culture with systematic theology as a world view defending the doctrine of penal substitution.
William Lane Craig in The Atonement in 2018 defended penal substitution and confronted opponents on penal substitution:
A biblically adequate atonement theory must not only include penal substitution as a central facet; it must also include propitiation, the appeasement of God’s just wrath against sin. The source of God’s wrath is His retributive justice, and so appeasement of wrath is a matter of the satisfaction of divine justice. We have seen that biblically the satisfaction of God’s justice primarily takes place, not as Anselm thought, through compensation, but through substitutionary punishment.[24]
In 2020, Craig debated Gregory Boyd over Craig’s book The Atonement. Boyd expressed a view similar to the cause and effect view of atonement by C. H. Dodd:
I agree that it’s expressed sometimes in judicial categories, but I think it’s more fundamentally expressed in organic categories ... for example, if you’re speeding and you break the law, well, then you get a fine, it’s imposed on you, that’s a judicial punishment, the legal punishment. But if you’re speeding, going down a hill that has a sharp curve at the bottom, and you don’t make that curve and end up getting in a crash and getting injured, maybe killed, that’s an organic punishment, an intrinsic punishment, because there’s no connection between the fine and speeding, but there is a definite connection between going down the hill speeding and getting in a crash. It seems to me that the reason you have the law is to warn people about the organic reality of the law.[25]
Gregory Boyd holds to a version of the Christus Victor view of atonement that accepts the other views of atonement as permissible except penal substitution satisfying God’s wrath.[26]
The denial of penal substitution continued following the liberal German theologians of the 18th and 19th century into the 20th and 21th century. There were and are worthy defenders of the penal substitution from J. I. Packer to William Lane Craig. This generation of believers needs to continue the good fight for the faith.
Conclusion
The doctrine of penal substitution and its result in the doctrine of propitiation is not an optional tenet of our faith. When the Philippian jailor asked Paul, “What must I do to be saved?” Paul gave him the short answer, “Believe on the Lord Jesus and you shall be saved.” In Romans 3:21-26, Paul gave the comprehensive answer. The doctrine that Rauschenbusch denied through biblical, historical, and systematic theology, is supported through biblical theology, the stalwarts of the faith throughout church history, and lastly with the systematic theology.
[1] D. A. Carson, “Systematic and Biblical Theology” in New Dictionary of Biblical Theology: Exploring the Unity Diversity of Scripture, eds. Brian S. Rosnner, T. Desmond Alexander, Graeme Goldsworthy, and D. A. Carson (Downers Grove: IVP Academic; Edition Unstated, 2000), 103.
[2] Roger R. Nicole makes this point: “Thus from the days of Socinus to the present, passing through Albrecht Ritschl [liberal German theologian], persistent efforts have been made to disparage and eliminate propitiation, apparently in the hope that if this keystone were discarded the whole edifice of objective atonement would be similarly overthrown” (Roger R. Nicole, “C. H. Dodd and the Doctrine of Propitiation” in Westminster Theological Journal, vol. 17:2, May 1955, 122).
[3] “The case for ‘expiation’ was put forward by C. H. Dodd in 1935 and at first gained wide support, but a generation of debate has shown that ‘the linguistic evidence seems to favour propitiation’” (J. I. Packer, “What Did The Cross Achieve: The Logic of Penal Substitution” in Celebrating the Saving Work of God: Collected Shorter Writings of J. I. Packer [Carlise: Patemoser, 1998], footnote 21).
[4] C. H. Dodd, The Bible and The Greeks (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1935; reprint, 1954), 88.
[5] Ibid., 93.
[6] A. M. Hunter, Interpreting Paul’s Gospel (Louisville: The Westminster Press; First Edition, 1954), 31-32. J. I. Packer agreed with Hunter’s affirmation of penal substitution: “Well, can we? And if not, what follows? Can we then justify ourselves in holding a view of the atonement into which penal substitution does not enter? Ought we not to reconsider whether penal substitution is not, after all, the heart of the matter? These are among the questions which our preliminary survey in this lecture has raised. It is to be hoped that they will receive the attention they deserve” (J. I. Packer, “What Did The Cross Achieve: The Logic of Penal Substitution” in Celebrating the Saving Work of God: Collected Shorter Writings of J. I. Packer [Carlisle: Patemoser, 1998], n.p.).
[7] Leon Morris, Apostolic Preaching of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956), 129, 130. James Montgomery Boice shows the difference between biblical and pagan propitiation. “In pagan religions, the worshippers always brought the sacrifice to appease their offended god. In Christianity, God the offended person, out of love, not only takes the initiative to provide the sacrifice, but is the sacrifice” (James Montgomery Boice, Foundations of the Christian Faith [Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1986], 311).
[8] C. H. Dodd, ‘The Epistle of Paul to the Romans’ James Moffatt, ed., The Moffatt New Testament Commentary (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1942), 20-21.
[9] Leon Morris, Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, 132.
[10] Ibid., 132.
[11] Ibid., 132
[12] C. H. Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, 22-23.
[13] Leon Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross, 132-134.
[14] Ibid., 135.
[15] Ibid., 135-136.
[16] Ibid., 160.
[17] Jason G. Duesing, “Humphreys/Patterson-1987: A Southern Baptist Debate on the Atonement” Midwestern Journal of Theology 16.2 (2017): 112-135.
[18] Ibid., 120.
[19] Ibid., 123.
[20] Albert Mohler, “The Wrath of God Was Satisfied: Substitutionary Atonement and the Conservative Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention,” The Briefing, August 12, 2013.
[21] Thomas R. Schreiner, “Penal Substitution View” in The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views, James Beilby and Paul R. Eddy, eds. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, Kindle Edition, 2006.
[22] Steve Chalke and Alan Mann. The Lost Message of Jesus (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2019), 182-183.
[23] D. A. Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emergent Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 185-87). (Thomas R. Schreiner, Penal Substitution View, 208)
[24] William Lane Craig, The Atonement: Elements in the Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition, 2018), 76.
[25] Eric Strandness, “Bill Craig & Greg Boyd’s debate shows why the cross and atonement matter.” Patheos, Oct 6, 2020.
[26] Boyd expresses his openness to all views of atonement: “Each model legitimately expresses a facet of what the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Christ accomplished” (Gregory Boyd, “The Christus Victor” in The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views, 23). “The Christus Victor model is able to encompass the essential truth of other atonement models” (ibid., 42-43). Boyd can except all the atonement models except penal substitution: “the Christus Victor model need not hold that our individual sins, guilt and deserved punishment were somehow legally transferred onto Jesus, that Jesus literally experienced the Father’s wrath or that the Father needed to punish his Son in order to be able to forgive us” (ibid., 43).