Penal Substitution & Ransom Theology (Dog Delusion part 3)

This post is taken from the previous 'Dog Delusion Part 2', which I have split into these two posts for ease of reading.


The serious questions of a new hermeneutical approach to the Bible will be discussed in a future blog, but for now I am going to discuss the doctrine of Penal Substitution, which was the other major cause of my loss of faith. I believed in Jesus, I was developing a new way of reading the Bible, but what about the reason Jesus had to die?

            The traditional Christian understanding of the cross, called ‘Penal Substitution’ teaches that all people are born under the wrath of God and destined for eternity in Hell. The reason God is so angry at everyone is because they are sinful, but he is the one who cursed them so that they would be that way in the first place. The reason he cursed every human being that would ever live is because Adam ate an apple in the Garden of Eden. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?

To save everyone from his own savage fury, he sent his only child to earth to be crucified and tortured, and vented all his inexpressible psychotic rage upon him as he died on the cross. Now that Jesus has been butchered to satisfy his own Father’s demand for a bloodbath, we can all go to Heaven when we die to be with that same God. It is a picture, I’m sure you will agree, that leaves a lot to be desired.

But is the message of Jesus inseparable from Penal Substitution, or is there some other way of understanding his death and resurrection? After looking into it, I discovered that Penal Substitution was not how the early church understood the cross; they understood it through a different framework called the Ransom. When I read it, it fit perfectly into place with what I already believed about Jesus, God and the Bible, and so I will now explain it in the light of New Theology.

We will start at the beginning with the reason we needed a saviour in the first place; the fall of man. If we recognise that the Old Testament is not historically 100% accurate, but communicates truth through myth, we are no longer bound to believe in a literal Eden story. Adam and Eve can be viewed as representations of those whom God entrusted with leadership over all of humanity. Whoever they were, God decided to take a risk on them, granting them also a limited level of authority over all life in the world and over the very planet itself. As a race they possessed freewill, but had only knowledge of good within which to exercise it. Life was heavenly as every new choice or decision uncovered a vast spectrum of new joys and wonders.

We can continue to develop our understanding of the fall of man using similar mythological language. At some point the leader of an evil faction from the unexplained spirit world; ‘the serpent’ or Satan, made the leaders of the human world an offer. He offered them knowledge. They already knew goodness, but he could offer them greater knowledge than God had already given them. He could give them knowledge of evil also, and he reminded them that God himself knew both good and evil – so why should they not? Surely if they possessed both, they too would become gods.

The knowledge offered was not free though, he would only give it at a price. The price echoed a similar offer made to Jesus in his temptation in the desert – they had to come under Satan’s authority. They had to put themselves (and the limited level of authority they had been granted by God) under him, and in return he would grant them knowledge of evil so that they could be ‘like God’, knowing both.

We too, their descendants, were required by Satan into the bargain, and for reasons we do not know, Adam and Eve agreed. Perhaps they thought they would be doing us a favour. Perhaps they believed that in selling us they would extend godhood to us too, or perhaps they were simply greedy and traded us without a second thought. For whatever reason, they agreed to Satan’s terms, and brought themselves and everything they had authority over under Satan in exchange for knowledge of good and evil.

The thing is, they were tricked by the serpent. They became like God in the sense that they now understood both good and bad, but they were still unlike him because they were not almighty, they could not always choose the good.

Under the new authority of the serpent, the world, all life on it, and the evolutionary processes which were underway became warped and twisted. Adam and Eve possessed only limited authority over these things, but all they had was transferred to Satan, and became corrupt to reflect its new master.

According to the Ransom Theory, mankind is not being punished by an angry God for Adam and Eve’s disobedience; we are suffering the consequences of being traded away to Satan by our ancient ancestors. Penal Substitution says that Adam ate an apple and so God cursed the whole planet and everything on it. Ransom Theology says that the earth is in a state of semi-fallenness because Adam and Eve transferred their power over it to the devil! God was not even involved in the fall, and is consequently not to blame for the pain-filled existence in which humanity finds itself.

Some might say ‘if God is all-powerful and all-loving, surely he is ultimately responsible for constructing the reality in which an outcome such as the fall was possible’. This boils down to the old (and very valid) problem of pain and suffering, the question of why it should be allowed by God, if he is both all-loving and all-powerful. Why should there be a reality in which we can suffer, if there is the option of one where we don’t?

My answer is that there is a serious problem with the question. I would like to make the somewhat unorthodox suggestion that God is not in fact omnipotent (all-powerful) in the modern-day understanding of the word, because the modern-day understanding of it is a complete nonsense. By the word ‘omnipotent’, we mean ‘capable of doing any act conceivable, both bad and good’, and I am personally of the belief that the God described by Jesus,[ii] is incapable of evil. Although on many points I disagree with Paul, the same thought seems to have occurred to him in 2 Timothy 2:13, where he states that God cannot be untrue to himself.

The modern concept of omnipotence, of a being that is capable both of perfect good and purest evil is a nonsense, because to be perfectly good, you cannot be capable of being evil!

Can God be unfaithful to himself?

Can God sin?

If the answer is no (which it is), then God is not morally ‘omnipotent’ in the modern-day understanding of the word. There simply is no omnipotent, anarchic, chaotic being of such insanity that it is capable of being both entirely good, and entirely evil; the very concept makes about as much sense as saying the cup is both entirely full and completely empty at the same time! Nonsense!

When people dispute Christianity with the problem of pain; that God cannot be both omnipotent, all-loving, and allow suffering, they are actually arguing from a place which they have not thought through, and making an ultimately meaningless statement on a par with claiming triangles are hungry, or pigeons are psychology.

Some might argue that God is capable of evil, but simply never chooses it, but at this point we enter into a matter of opinion, which cannot really be “proved” either way. It is my personal belief that our Father God cannot sin, and cannot want to sin, and so therefore is not capable of sinning.  One might answer the question of ‘can God sin?’ by saying ‘yes, theoretically he could if he wanted to’, but if the truth is he is incapable of wanting to sin then the real answer simply has to be ‘no’.

Is God capable of wanting to sin? No? Then when it comes to morality, he is not omnipotent as he can only choose the good (and thank God for that!).

God may not be ‘morally omnipotent’, but he is nevertheless almighty; that is, the mightiest being that there is. If good is mightier than evil (which it is),[iii] and God is the only one who is perfectly good (which he is),[iv] then he is therefore the mightiest one of all. However, he cannot be simultaneously perfect in goodness and be capable of evil… that just doesn’t make sense.

When we rephrase the problem of suffering in this slightly altered light, it begins to take on a little more intelligent meaning; “If God is all-loving, perfect in goodness, and almighty, why does he allow suffering in the world?”

The answer I would offer is found in the previous rereading of the Adam and Eve myth. The very bottom rung of goodness is fairness,[v] and if God is perfect in goodness, he must also be perfectly fair.[vi] He took a risk on Adam and Eve, whoever they were, and he granted them a certain level of authority, which was truly and unconditionally theirs to do with as they willed.

They legally sold it to Satan, and as he had bought and paid for it, it was now Satan’s right to introduce a strain of evil into all the things Adam and Eve had previously ruled. The two parties had struck and completed a bargain, and God being bound by his own fairness, had no choice but to allow the transaction to continue, resulting in their percentage of the world taking on hellish characteristics. It is a good thing God did not give Adam and Eve complete authority over the planet, because it would have literally become ‘hell-on-earth’ when they traded it into the hands of the devil! God did not take bring about the fall in anyway whatsoever, the whole thing happened behind his back.

In this light, the death of Jesus on the cross becomes not the satisfaction of a furiously angry God, but the gift of a loving Father who has decided to offer himself in exchange for our release. It is not as Steve Chalke so famously put it; ‘divine child abuse’, it is rather God freely offering his own death as the ransom to set humanity free from the devil’s legal authority over them. It is God breaking everyone one of us out of prison, and then staying behind to face the music himself.

However, God is not just ‘good’, he is perfectly good, and this goes far beyond basic fairness to include grace, that is, undeserved favour. Grace is goodness that doesn’t just pay off the balance, but that gives over and above the legal obligation.

God decided to buy humanity back from Satan, and offered himself to his enemy as the ransom. Satan, seeing another opportunity for personal advancement through a bargain, leapt at the chance, and greedily swallowed up the life of Christ in payment. He laughed at Jesus’ stupidity, crowing over his dead body that even though humanity were no longer owned by hell, God was dead so they could never be owned by heaven either. With God dead and gone, he alone would be the supreme power in existence!

But here is the catch – the serpent tricked humanity into fallenness on the half-truth of ‘becoming like God’, and so God (being as wise as a snake but innocent as a dove)[vii] tricked Satan into taking Jesus as the ransom for humanity. Satan took the bait, not realising what Jesus was worth before he devoured him.

As C.S. Lewis put it, the White Witch thought she had finally killed Aslan, who had offered himself up to save Edmund the traitor according to the ‘Deep magic from the dawn of time’. However, Aslan came back from the dead, because the White Witch did not know about the ‘Deeper magic from before the dawn of time’. This magic said that if an innocent victim is killed in a traitor’s stead, death itself begins to work backwards![viii]

Christ not only paid the price to purchase back all of humanity from Satan, he overpaid by so much that he reversed death itself. This is Ransom Theology, and I suspect that you also find it infinitely closer to the picture of the grace-giving God of Jesus Christ than the monstrous God of Penal Substitution.

There is however, much more to Ransom Theology. In offering a payment of perfect, infinite goodness, Jesus set the scales of justice at a massive, eternal imbalance. It doesn’t matter how great the sin of all humanity might be on the one side of the scales, if the counter-balance is infinity, it wipes clean the debt, and then keeps on paying!

The transaction of infinite goodness paid for finite sin suddenly puts Satan in a very dangerous position indeed. He who once poached a whole race from God through an underhanded legal trick now finds himself horribly and ominously indebted to that same God. He who once held high the heavenly law-book to justify himself begins to be pinned down beneath its crushing weight. He had thought the game was his, but one greedy move left him desperately trying to escape checkmate.

The sacrifice of Jesus on the cross purchases the freedom of our race from Satan completely, then it purchases back the life of Christ himself, who rises from the dead.

Next it purchases resurrection for every freed person who wishes to come under the authority of God.

Satan begins to realise that he can put all of us, every human being he will ever own onto his side of the scale, every animal he has ever corrupted, every part of the earth he has ever stirred up to destruction, and still the imbalance will remain.

After the whole planet has been redeemed, Satan will see that the infinite payment of Christ is still paying, making the balance uneven; he is still in God’s debt – and God has a legal right to come for him. He will then throw a handful of the lowest of his fallen angels onto the scales to appease their infinite demand, but their deaths will not be sufficient.

One by one he will throw every wicked creature he possesses onto the scales to delay the approach of the divine Debt Collector who has so magnificently turned the tables on him, but nothing will quench the death of Jesus.

At last no evil thing will remain for him to offer on the great scales, and the Debt Collector will come and claim his final (and thoroughly insufficient) instalment. Satan himself will be cast upon the scales by God, and the father of lies will vanish into oblivion. His whole existence will be swallowed up as an unwilling offering which cannot even hope to make a dent in the debt owed to the all-consuming event of Christ upon the cross.