Their system is briefly this: God is bound to punish sin, and to punish it to the uttermost. His justice requires that sin be punished. But he loves man, and does not want to punish him if he can help it. Jesus Christ says, ‘I will take his punishment upon me.’ God accepts his offer, and lets man go unpunished—upon a condition. His justice is more than satisfied by the punishment of an infinite being instead of a world of worthless creatures. The suffering of Jesus is of greater value than that of all the generations, through endless ages, because he is infinite, pure, perfect in love and truth, being God’s own everlasting son. God’s condition with man is, that he believe in Christ’s atonement thus explained. A man must say, ‘I have sinned, and deserve to be tortured to all eternity. But Christ has paid my debts, by being punished instead of me. Therefore he is my Saviour. I am now bound by gratitude to him to turn away from evil.’ — George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons
First theorized by Anselm in Cur Deus Homo, around 1097 AD (though not as severe as it as become).
. . . an absurd problem came to the surface: 'How COULD God permit that (crucifixion of Jesus Christ)!' . . . the deranged reason of the little community found quite a frightfully absurd answer: God gave his Son for forgiveness, as a SACRIFICE . . . The SACRIFICE FOR GUILT, and just in its most repugnant and barbarous form - the sacrifice of the innocent for the sins of the guilty! What horrifying heathenism! — Friedrich Nietzsche
Metropolitan Kallistos' four criteria for evaluating theories of salvation:
First of all, we should ask: Does the model in question envisage a change in God or in us? If it presupposes that God is being changed, then something has surely gone wrong. We should reject the image of God the Father as an angry despot who has somehow to be appeased. Some theories of the atonement seem to suggest that we need to be rescued from God rather than from sin and evil. But in the key text that I’ve put at the top of our sheet, Paul says God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not reconciling himself to the world. It is we who need reconciling and healing, not God. We who need changing, not God.
Then my second question is: Does the theory in question separate Christ from the Father? If Christ is separated from Father, then again something has surely gone wrong. Paul says God was in Christ. Salvation is God’s work in Christ. We are to see Christ in his ministry as God’s representative, not his victim. Even if we affirm Christ’s solidarity and union with ourselves through the incarnation, this must not be in such a way as to separate him from the Father. The unity of the Trinity is to be upheld.
Then the third question: Does the model isolate the cross from the incarnation and the resurrection? Some theories of the atonement are rather exclusively cross-centered, but the cross should not be isolated from what went before—the incarnation, and from what comes after, the resurrection. Otherwise, the continuity and coherence of Christ’s economy is broken. We are to see Christ’s saving work as a unity: birth, life, miracles, death, resurrection, ascension. Altogether constitute a single, undivided action.
And then question 4: Does the model presuppose an objective or subjective understanding of Christ’s work? Does the saving work of Christ appeal primarily to our feelings and emotions, or does it change the state of the universe? Surely the latter. God was in Christ altering our total situation. Christ has done something for us objective.
- In this scheme, atonement is prior to forgiveness (which is exactly backwards).
- It makes God’s relationship with us primarily legal, not filial (having to do with ‘sonship’). Penal substitution makes us objects of law, rather than sons and daughters, who are the subjects of the Father’s love.
- The logic of it requires denying the Trinity. It requires that the Son and the Father be in opposition to each other. If God were one, all sins against the Father would be against the Son also, and if the Father to be just cannot forgive sins without applicable penalty, then no more can the Son in justice offer mankind free forgiveness by giving himself.
- It also creates the absurdity of God punishing himself to satisfy his own need to punish. The whole theory assumes Jesus is not God but some other being negotiating with him.
- How could Jesus forgive sinners before his death, if PSA is the only way?
From George MacDonald:
If there be no satisfaction to justice in the mere punishment of the wrong-doer, what shall we say of the notion of satisfying justice by causing one to suffer who is not the wrong-doer? And what, moreover, shall we say to the notion that, just because he is not the person who deserves to be punished, but is absolutely innocent, his suffering gives perfect satisfaction to the perfect justice? That the injustice be done with the consent of the person maltreated makes no difference: it makes it even worse, seeing, as they say, that justice requires the punishment of the sinner, and here is one far more than innocent. They have shifted their ground; it is no more punishment, but mere suffering the law requires! The thing gets worse and worse. I declare my utter and absolute repudiation of the idea in any form whatever. Rather than believe in a justice—that is, a God—to whose righteousness, abstract or concrete, it could be any satisfaction for the wrong-doing of a man that a man who did no wrong should suffer, I would be driven from among men, and dwell with the wild beasts that have not reason enough to be unreasonable. What! God, the father of Jesus Christ, like that! His justice contented with direst injustice! The anger of him who will nowise clear the guilty, appeased by the suffering of the innocent! Very God forbid!
Unable to believe in the forgivingness of their father in heaven, they invented a way to be forgiven that should not demand of him so much; which might make it right for him to forgive; which should save them from having to believe downright in the tenderness of his father-heart, for that they found impossible. They thought him bound to punish for the sake of punishing, as an offset to their sin; they could not believe in clear forgiveness; that did not seem divine; it needed itself to be justified; so they invented for its justification a horrible injustice, involving all that was bad in sacrifice, even human sacrifice. They invented a satisfaction for sin which was an insult to God. He sought no satisfaction, but an obedient return to the Father. What satisfaction was needed he made himself in what he did to cause them to turn from evil and go back to him. The thing was too simple for complicated unbelief and the arguing spirit.
Very different are the good news Jesus brings us from certain prevalent representations of the gospel, founded on the pagan notion that suffering is an offset for sin, and culminating in the vile assertion that the suffering of an innocent man, just because he is innocent, yea perfect, is a satisfaction to the holy Father for the evil deeds of his children. As a theory concerning the atonement nothing could be worse, either intellectually, morally, or spiritually; announced as the gospel itself, as the good news of the kingdom of heaven, the idea is monstrous as any Chinese dragon. Such a so-called gospel is no gospel, however accepted as God-sent by good men of a certain development. It is evil news, dwarfing, enslaving, maddening–news to the child-heart of the dreariest damnation. Doubtless some elements of the gospel are mixed up with it on most occasions of its announcement; none the more is it the message received from him. It can be good news only to such as are prudently willing to be delivered from a God they fear, but unable to accept the gospel of a perfect God, in whom to trust perfectly.
To make my meaning clearer,—some of you say we must trust in the finished work of Christ; or again, our faith must be in the merits of Christ—in the atonement he has made—in the blood he has shed: all these statements are a simple repudiation of the living Lord, in whom we are told to believe, who, by his presence with and in us, and our obedience to him, lifts us out of darkness into light, leads us from the kingdom of Satan into the glorious liberty of the sons of God. No manner or amount of belief about him is the faith of the New Testament … What I insist upon is, that a man’s faith shall be in the living, loving, ruling, helping Christ, devoted to us as much as ever he was, and with all the powers of the Godhead for the salvation of his brethren.
Not necessarily mutually exclusive of each other:
- Christus Victor: Adam and Eve made humanity subject to the Devil during the fall, and that God, in order to redeem humanity, sent Christ as a "ransom" or "bait" so that the Devil, not knowing Christ couldn't die permanently, would kill him, and thus lose all right to humanity following the resurrection. This was the predominant view of the early church for the first thousand years of church history, and was supported by nearly every Church Father including Irenaeus, Origen of Alexandria, and Augustine of Hippo.
- Recapitulation: Christ is seen as the new Adam who succeeds where Adam failed. Christ undoes the wrong that Adam did and, because of his union with humanity, leads humankind on to eternal life (including moral perfection). This is concordant with Christus Victor.
- T.F. Torrence's “incarnational redemption” or “atoning reconciliation”: incarnation itself is transformative for all humanity. Hence, the incarnation is an ontological (having to do with ‘being’ or ‘nature’) event; that is, redemption is worked out within the hypostatic union of God and humanity in the one person of Jesus Christ.
https://www.scribd.com/document/148066225/On-the-Doctrine-of-Atonement#fullscreen