In N.T. Wright’s book, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion, he summarizes popular conceptions of the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement as follows.
a). All humans sinned, causing God to be angry and to want to kill them, to burn them forever in in “hell.”
b) Jesus somehow got in the way and took the punishment instead (it helped, it seems, that he was innocent – oh, and that he was God’s own son too).
c). We are in the clear after all, heading for “heaven” instead (provided, of course, we believe it).
a). All humans sinned, causing God to be angry and to want to kill them, to burn them forever in in “hell.”After this summary Wright eviscerates the PSA model (both in its popular and more sophisticated forms), yet without jettisoning the notion of substitution or even punishment in a qualified sense.
Fun fact: in this remarkable work Wright also has a bash at the Westminster Confession of Faith and its teaching about the “covenant of works.” He shows that whatever rational sense the covenant of works might make, it falls into the same problem as PSA in contradicting the Bible’s own explanation of how salvation works.
Further Reading
- Why I Stopped Being a Calvinist (Part 1): Calvinism presents a dehistoricized Bible
- Why I Stopped Being a Calvinist (Part 2): Calvinism Destroys God’s Justice
- Why I Stopped Being a Calvinist (Part 3): Calvinism Dislocates God From our Experience of Him
- Why I Stopped Being a Calvinist (Part 4): The Heresy of Monergism
- Why I Stopped Being a Calvinist (Part 5): A Deformed Christology
- Was Calvin a Nominalist? Part 1: Historical and Theological Background
- Was Calvin a Nominalist? Part 2: Surveying the Scholarship
- Was Calvin a Nominalist? Part 3: Voluntarism, Nominalism and the Theology of Calvin