Easing Comer’s Fears On Penal Substitution

Best-selling author and former pastor John Mark Comer has worries about evangelical views of the atonement. In a series of recent Instagram posts, he pointed to Andrew Rillera’s book Lamb of the Free as putting the nail in the coffin of penal substitution—widely viewed as a central aspect of the meaning of Christ’s death in Protestantism.

After understandable dismay and pushback, Comer apologized for his carelessness in the way he commended the book, and clarified his concerns with penal substitution. Comer’s concerns merit reflection as his struggles with the theological underpinnings of penal substitution reflect common confusions in the pews.

Comer’s statements explain the initial appeal of the Lamb of the Free:

There are a growing number of us are conservative (in the older sense of the word)  and orthodox who struggle to map some of the modern Western ideas of atonement onto the New Testament and most of church history, namely, the claim that the Father poured out his wrath on Jesus in the form of retributive justice/violence rather than on us. (An idea that begins with a possible misreading of Leviticus)…I believe the Father AND THE SON (and the Holy Spirit) were working TOGETHER to save and redeem us through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. All motivated by mercy and love, while still maintaining justice. Jesus has done for us what we could never, ever do for ourselves.

I want to review some good biblical and historic answers to these concerns, so we might rest more assured in the glory of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit’s work to save us in Christ’s death in our place.

Alleviating Comer’s Concerns

1. PSA Isn’t Novel or Merely Western

First, forms of penal substitution teaching can be found in the fathers and medievals. It’s all over church history. Chapter 4 of Joshua McNall’s The Mosaic of Atonement is instructive. Relatedly, it isn’t simply a “Western doctrine.” It is affirmed globally. My uncles who are pastors in Latin America preach it, and my Nigerian, Korean, Chinese, and Indonesian brothers and sisters in grad school all received it from their churches back home before they arrived in the States.

2. PSA Isn’t Exclusive but Expansive

Second, penal substitution need not exclude any of the other varied accomplishments of the cross, as some often suppose. As Paul says, Christ conquers the Devil by forgiving our sins through cancelling our guilt in the condemnation of the cross (Col. 2:14). Many works could be consulted here, but Jeremy Treat’s The Atonement: An Introduction admirably lists and seamlessly integrates a host of dimensions to Christ’s perfect work.

3. PSA Is Trinitarian

Third, pastors can run afoul by preaching an atonement theory that splits apart the work of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. This mistake must be rejected. The three persons of the Trinity are wholly united in their work of redemption. (See the first two chapters of Thomas McCall, Forsaken: The Trinity, the Cross, and Why It Matters.)

Which God Atones?

The reformers taught, as Scripture does, that God is forever Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He is immutable (unchangeable). He is impassible (unable to suffer in his divine being, explaining why Jesus assumes human nature in the first place). He is simple (he is not made up of parts and can’t be divided into bits, even into the persons). The triune God has one nature, one will, and one power. So everything God does is done by all of God—the Father, Son and Spirit inseparably and indivisibly. As Gregory Nyssa says, “There is one motion . . . which proceeds from the Father, through the Son, to the Spirit” (An Answer to Ablabius).

We see in the New Testament a loving Father sending the loving Son to become incarnate as our Messiah and King. Jesus acts on our behalf, in the power of the Spirit (of love), to live, to obey, to heal, teach, preach, suffer, be rejected, and crucified at the hands of sinful men and women. He endures the judgment that our sins deserve.

I have often looked to Jesus’s words in John 10:17–18: “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.” Jesus affirms that he and the Father are of one will in our salvation. The Son freely comes in the flesh, to lay down his life, to offer himself on our behalf “through the eternal Spirit” (Heb. 9:14), and the Father loves him for it in the eternal Spirit. As John Owen argued, penal substitution counts on Christ’s Spirit-graced life being pleasing to God to work.

Wrath and Love?

OK, but how can we claim that Jesus suffers God’s wrath and still affirm that God loves him? Even Calvin wrestled with this question:

Yet we do not suggest that God was ever inimical or angry toward him. How could he be angry toward his beloved Son, “in whom his heart reposed” [cf. Matthew 3:17]? How could Christ by his intercession appease the Father toward others, if he were himself hateful to God? This is what we are saying: he bore the weight of divine severity, since he was “stricken and afflicted” [cf. Isaiah 53:5] by God’s hand, and experienced all the signs of a wrathful and avenging God. (Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.xvi.11)

Remember, first, God is impassible. He doesn’t suffer, his affections and emotions aren’t reactions to provocations like that of finite humans. Wrath speaks of God’s infinitely holy, perfect will in its opposition to sin. It wills to remove and treat sin as it deserves. It’s not a violent flare-up or a convulsion in his nature.

This is why sometimes it’s helpful to simply think of wrath as emotive language for God’s justice. It’s a biblical way of expressing that his justice isn’t an abstraction, it’s a personal reality to which he’s committed. God is opposed to idolatry, to rape, to racism, to abuse, to theft, to murder, to bloodshed, and to exploiting the poor. God’s wrath will treat these atrocities as he has promised he would. Whatever theology of atonement we advocate, it must deal with the severity of our injustice, the howls of human oppression, the blood of Abel crying out from the ground for a just answer. Don’t our hearts long for this?

Remember, second, it’s God’s justice—all of God. It’s the justice of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So whatever judgment Jesus suffers—it’s also the judgment of the eternal Son. Sometimes in theology, we “appropriate” a work to one person of the Trinity in the history of redemption even though all of them equally participate in the work. We speak of the Son’s incarnation because only the Son becomes incarnate, but by the power of the Spirit by the will of the Father (Luke 1:35–37), or creation as the work of the Father (Gen. 1:1), through the Son (John 1:1–5; Col. 1:16), and the Spirit (Gen. 1:3).

Something like this is happening in the judgment the Son endures. The Father sent Jesus to suffer and handed him over (John 3:16; Rom 8:3, 32), so judgment is said to be the Father’s, though it is that of the Triune God as a whole.

This is glory. This is mystery. This is grace. This is good news worth wrestling with until we get a blessing.

Remember, third, the Son suffers this judgment in his human flesh. It was Jesus the incarnate Son who was handed over to suffer death as one of us. Jesus is the last Adam, so he could endure in his human soul and body the judgment on sin that the triune God set upon it long ago in the garden (Gen. 3). The Son underwent these things in his humanity as our representative and substitute. He endured God’s wrath for us in his humanity.

God Who Self-Substitutes

John Stott famously wrote about the cross as the “self-substitution” of God. God takes our place in Christ because we took his place in our sin. This is glory. This is mystery. This is grace. This is good news worth wrestling with until we get a blessing.

To that end, check out these additional resources:

1. The Crucified King by Jeremy Treat
2. Atonement, Law, and Justice by Adonis Vidu
3. Atonement: A Guide for the Perplexed by Adam Johnson