Penal Substitution, part two

I haven't been idle in doing more research on penal substitution. I ran across an excellent article called The Logic of Penal Substitution by Packer. It's well-written, considers several different views of the atonement, and provides a decent apologetic for the doctrine of penal substitution.


In my conversations elsewhere, the notion of participation as a model for understanding the Passover, and by extension, the cross has come up, and I wanted to expound on it a little bit.

One criticism of the penal substitution model is that there's more going on than the death of the lamb. If we were to expect the focus of the Passover to be penal substitution, wouldn't there be more of an emphasis on the sacrifice than there is? There's plenty of verses there about the preparation of the food, the manner in which it's to be eaten, and so on. Why is all that there if the focus is on the judgment?

The simple response to this is that of course there's more going on than a mitigation of judgment. We should expect more and hope for it also—there's certainly more to our relationship with God than no longer being condemned.

Instead of seeing substitution penally, others see it as a matter of participation. This is a difficult concept for me to explain, but I'll do my best. Packer does do a good job, so I'd advise reading his essay.

But we can see two different (not necessarily opposing) ways of helping others. The first is doing for them what they cannot do themselves; the second is helping them to help themselves. So rather than "I'll do for you what you cannot do for yourself," they see the cross as, "I'll enable you to participate in a relationship with God."

So some see the elaborate instructions concerning the preparation of food and so on as a means of participating in the Passover.


This is all well and good, but it really doesn't change the fact that there is a very clear judgment and condemnation, and that the Israelite first-born faced it as well as the Egyptian. It secondly doesn't really answer the point that the penal substitution model may very well encapsulate others, and properly should. It has a larger scope.

So I am still waiting to see where else it goes, and trying to put my mind in an older frame of reference.