Summary:
As a derivative of the Satisfaction Theory, the Penal Substitution Theory stresses that Jesus willingly took the punishment for our sins upon himself and satisfied the wrath of God that we deserved. This meshes with the living parables of Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah, Passover, and Yom Kippur.
Anselm’s Satisfaction model was remolded into the Penal Substitution model during the 16th century Reformation, primarily by John Calvin and Martin Luther. For the Reformers, the important theological question that needed to be resolved was how can sinners be made righteous before a holy God who cannot leave sin unpunished? So they shifted the focus of the satisfaction theory to consider both the divine offense and divine justice.
Their answer was that God’s righteousness demands punishment for human sin, but God in his grace supplied the one to bear it, when his son Jesus willingly accepted the punishment for sin in mankind’s place. This is the important difference between Anselm’s Satisfaction Theory and Penal Substitution Theory. For Anselm, Christ obeyed in our place; for Calvin, Christ was punished in our place.
Author Stephen Morrison explains:
“The result is that within Penal Substitution, Jesus Christ dies to satisfy God’s wrath against human sin. Jesus is punished (penal) in the place of sinners (substitution) in order to satisfy the justice of God and the legal demand of God to punish sin.”
Stephen D. Morrison, Seven Theories of the Atonement Summarized
Biola University professor, William Lane Craig, adds an important clarification:
“The wrath of God is not hatred but retributive justice. God loves even those who are justly condemned before him and so sends his Son to redeem them.”
William Lane Craig, Atonement and the Death of Christ (p. 107)
Within Reformed and evangelical churches, this is the dominant theory today. Professor Thomas Schreiner of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary has a good summary:
“The Father, because of his love for human beings, sent his Son (who offered himself willingly and gladly) to satisfy God’s justice, so that Christ took the place of sinners. The punishment and penalty we deserved was laid on Jesus Christ instead of us, so that in the cross both God’s holiness and love are manifested.”
Thomas Schreiner, The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views, (Author of Chapter 2)
Objections to the Penal Substitution Theory (PST)
Most of the objections to PST relate to the difference between a debt and a legal penalty. We can agree that someone else can pay a debt that we owe, but not that someone else can truly discharge a punishment we earned. That seems to make Jesus our “whipping boy” and leaves the mistaken impression that God is angry while Jesus is compassionate and forgiving. While God can certainly be righteously angry, that impression is contrary to the Bible as a whole. God and Jesus are not divided from one another. The Bible never implies that Jesus changed God’s mind about humanity.
Theologian N.T. Wright has addressed this on many occasions. In one episode of “Ask NT Wright Anything” he was asked for his reaction to penal substitution. He responded that:
“John 3:16 tells us ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only son’. But what people hear is ‘God so hated the world that he killed his only son’. If that is what people have heard and are hearing, we have serious work to do.”
Wright also says:
At the center of the whole picture we do not find a wrathful God bent on killing someone, demanding blood. Instead, we find the image — I use the word advisedly — of the covenant-keeping God who takes the full force of sin onto himself.
N. T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began (p. 185) Kindle Edition
Many of the objections to PST relate to the fact that today it’s the only facet of atonement many Christians will ever hear. None of the theories can give us a balanced view of atonement on its own.