When I was an evangelical involved in multiple stupid ministries, we were encouraged to memorize Bible verses that we believed to most succinctly capture the heart of the gospel. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Rom. 8:32). “But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed” (Isa. 53:5).
Though I’m not sure even most of my Protestant brothers and sisters would have been able to define them as such, all of these verses were used to support a particularly Protestant understanding of salvation—namely, penal substitutionary atonement. Such a concept, promoted by the leaders of the Reformation, effectively means that the guilt of mankind’s sin was transferred to Christ, so God treated Jesus as a sinner, or even the personification of sin, thus necessitating God’s wrath upon him. “Whatever sins I, you, all of us have committed or shall commit, they are Christ’s sins as if he had committed them Himself,” says Luther in his Commentary on Galatians. “Christ is here exhibited in another view, as transferring to himself the punishment due to us, and wiping away our guilt in the sight of God,” writes Calvin in his Institutes of the Christian Religion.
But is that the best reading of these verses? Michał Paluch, O.P., professor of fundamental and dogmatic theology at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas, in his excellent Fundamental Soteriology: On the Fullness of Life, argues that there are strong theological and exegetical reasons against this interpretation.
Let’s start with the word “sin” in the Bible. As Paluch notes, the Old Testament sometimes uses the word “sin” to mean “sin offering.” We see this, for example, in the Levitical Code, which contains arrangements for expiatory sacrifices, consistently describing “the sin offering” as “the sin” (see Lev. 4:21, 24, 5:9, 12; Exod. 29:14; Num. 6:14). Moreover, also pace Protestant interpretations, the animal offered for sin did not become a “sin carrier” or even “sin” demanding eradication. Rather, a sin offering is described as “holy” (see Lev. 6:18), whereas the “scapegoat” becomes unworthy to touch the burnt offerings altar and is driven into the wilderness. “Sacrifice is not understood in the Old Testament as the deposition of sins on an animal to destroy it through violence. Rather, it is a call for new life, by giving back to God the most valuable parts of human possessions.”
Thus, when we read in Scripture that Jesus became or was made sin, it is this meaning that is in view. Such an interpretation certainly seems to make better sense of the context of 2 Corinthians 5, which is about Christ reconciling us to himself, and Romans 8, in which Christ is described as interceding for sinners. Otherwise, argues Paluch, the direction would be less that God loves us in Christ and more that God condemns the son on our behalf. The Reformers, in turn, were wrong to say that Christ in an absolute sense is “cursed by God”; rather, Christ is “cursed (by God) in the eyes of Israel,” or “regarded by Israel as cursed by God.”
The fourth song of the suffering servant of Yahweh, Paluch admits, is the prooftext that comes closest to penal substitution. Nevertheless, the suffering servant’s silence is noted because it is abnormal for someone facing persecution, influencing the group that appears in the song as “we.” This, argues Paluch, is what “bearing the guilt” or “taking away the sins of many” is about—not assuming the role of the guilty, but submitting to persecution without retaliating. “The suffering servant of Yahweh ‘accepts the guilt’ of others in the sense that he does not demand punishment for the wrong done to himself,” instead reserving judgment to God. “This is what the servant’s “bearing of guilt’ consists of; martyrdom and renunciation of retribution for persecution turns out to be a cultic gift (or perhaps even sacrifice), which brings clemency to the guilty; the plan of conversion through silence, rejection of violence, is the work of Yahweh.”
Let’s now turn to Paluch’s rhetorical arguments against penal substitutionary atonement. First, it is an odd sense of justice indeed that involves transferring punishment from the guilty to the innocent, which does not solve the problem of guilt for committed sins. Indeed, such a framework might actually imply that “one injustice (sin and incurred guilt) is followed by another one (guilt is transferred from the guilty to the innocent),” one that implicates God himself. Moreover, why can God not simply forgive the sins? “Is God the Father so ruthless that someone must necessarily suffer the punishment for sin, and if it is not the sinner himself, then it can (must?) be his beloved Son?” This is a cold, ruthless form of justice, in which God simultaneously loves and hates.
Instead, Paluch gravitates to a view of salvation that identifies the cross of Christ as a demonstration of God’s love for humanity, seen in Christ freely offering himself to the human race in union with the Father. This is certainly the perspective of the Patristic tradition: Christ is in solidarity with sinful humanity. “He takes a body of our kind . . . [and] gave it over to death in the stead of all,” writes St. Athanasius. Sacrifice is not the “substitutionary elimination of sin,” but rather “the handing over to God of the most previous part of creation,” a “generous gift of obedience and love leading to the ultimate union of the whole humanity with God.”
This is how we are saved: not by condemning Christ in our place, but through the Incarnation, which expresses perfect solidarity with mankind, the ransoming of sinners as a compensation for sin, and the incredible gift of sacrifice by the God-man. As St. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote, “what thou, my Lord, hast suffered was all for sinners’ gain.”