Old errors have a habit of recycling themselves. I’ve written recently about the resurgence of Federal Vision theology in the UK and how back in the noughties we faced a triumvirate of to theological errors, FV, the denial of Penal Substitution and Open Theism. Well, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that Open Theism is making a comeback soon too as we also seem to be seeing a return of the attacks on Penal Substitution.
Author and pastor, John Mark Comer has shared some social media posts recently expressing his concerns about Penal Substitution. Gavin Ortland has engaged with him here,
You can also go back and read some of the helpful material responding to the previous controversy. I would recommend Pierced for Our Transgressions by Sach, Ovey and Jeffries as a good starting point and there’s the even older work “The Cross of Christ” by John Stott for those who want toi dig deeper. I’ve written significantly on the subject here.
Returning to the contemporary debate, Derek Rishmawy has written this response on the TGC website which I believe is helpful overall. However, I have a question mark or quibble about how he employs and articulates the doctrine of impassibility. To be clear, I believe in the doctrine of Impassibility and I do think it is helpful to our understanding of Penal Substitution. It means that when we see Christ take on the punishment of sin and bear the wrath of God, that this is not about God the Father losing his temper at us and his son getting in the way. Rather, this is about the triune God’s settled will towards sin and evil. So, I affirm the following from Rishmawy
“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.
However, he goes on to say:
This is why sometimes it’s helpful to simply think of wrath as emotive language for God’s justice.
It’s this bit that I think is unhelpful. In the previous paragraph, he has talked about God’s “affections and emotions” and said that impassibility tells us what they are not. They are not “reactions to provocations.” That’s helpful. However, the second statement risks undoing that good work. By describing “wrath” as “emotive language”, he can make it sound like wrath is actually the type of emotion that God does not have and therefore that it is merely anthropological language
Further, if “wrath” is just another and emotive word for justice then it doesn’t actually extend our understanding of God’s justice much. We do better to say that God is simple and so his wrath is another perspective on his one nature, just as love, justice, eternity etc are. Wrath is a consequence of God’s justice, that he loves good and hates evil. This means that we want to talk about it not just as an emotive word but as a genuine affection in God.
This is important because a misunderstood version of impassibility could be just as harmful to our understanding of penal substitution. Just as we may react and recoil at the idea of a God who gets mad at his Son and vindictively pours out his anger on him like he has something to get off his chest, just as much we would be uncomfortable with the idea of an unfeeling God who does not respond at all to us and to his Son. The risk then is that we end up with a distant deist God and the process of history.
Rishmawy returns to surer ground when he writes:
“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?
Faithroots 