A common understanding of Christ’s death on the cross goes something like this: Due to the wrath that God planned to unleash upon sinners, he sent Christ as a substitute to die in our place (Christ took the punishment that we deserve). For God to forgive us and maintain his holiness, he had to subject an innocent victim to torture. I myself, admittedly, find this view of the atonement rather perverse. Why would a loving God hold such intense wrath toward his creation? After all, we are merely finite beings, who never chose to be here in the first place, committing finite sins. Moreover, God created persons with free will, which by its nature, entails that persons will not always choose the good. Another question, and perhaps the most concerning one, is the following: why would God require an innocent person to be executed to nullify his wrath? Would it, under any circumstance, be just to punish the innocent in place of the guilty? It would seem not. Therefore, instead of being freed from “wrath,” we should interpret the text as being freed from sin and death. Not only do I believe this is the correct interpretation, but it seems to be the most morally and rationally situated view of the atonement.
It is striking to discover that the early Christians did not hold to penal substitutionary atonement (PSA from here forward). Instead, their model of the atonement was based on the sensational act of Christ entering our fallen world to conquer sin and death. The American philosopher and Eastern Orthodox Theologian, David Bentley Hart, states the following:
“It is hard to know how often one hears it said, for instance, that the gospels or Paul’s epistles teach that, on the cross of Christ, God poured out his wrath on sin, or that the Son was discharging a debt humanity owed to the Father, or that Christ’s blood was shed as a price paid by the Son to the Father to secure our release from the burden of that debt. And, supposedly, this was all inevitable not simply on account of sins we have individually committed, but because we have inherited a guilt contracted by the first parents of the race (which, of course, must be a purely imputed guilt, since personal guilt is not logically heritable). All of us, we are told, have been born damnable in God’s eyes, already condemned to hell, and justly so. And yet God, out…
