What in the world is penal substitution?

Everybody uses this phrase, but I never see it defined. And this creates a great deal of unnecessary and obscure arguments. Do Orthodox Christians believe in penal substitution? In one sense, of course they do. How could they not? Orthodox Christians believe in the Scriptures, and the Scriptures teach that Christ took the penalty that we deserve. We have sinned, and we are therefore under God’s curse. Christ took the curse of the law so that we might receive the Spirit of promise through faith. That sounds like a penalty and substitution to me. Orthodoxy also is Patristic. We read Scripture within the theology of the Fathers, and the Fathers teach that Christ took the penalty we deserved. Take the words of St. John Chrysostom, commenting on the above text from Galatians 3:

“It was like an innocent man’s undertaking to die for another sentenced to death, and so rescuing him from punishment. For Christ took upon Him not the curse of transgression, but the other curse, in order to remove that of others.”

It’s all there. There’s a crime, there’s a penalty, and there’s substitution by an innocent person.

Instead of saying what we don’t believe, here’s what we do believe. We believe that Adam was created as the microcosmic mediator of the world. He was a miniature creation, and it was therefore through Adam that God’s life would be communicated with the created order. When God took dust, He put the Spirit inside it to constitute Adam as “living.” The Spirit dwells in the heart and communicates life to Adam, who passes it to the world. But when Adam oriented his will and energies against God, that life-giving connection was severed, and Adam was condemned to death. This is both a natural consequence of sin (since God is the only source of life) and a penalty: how could a man of death rule righteously over God’s good world?

The Eternal Son, in whom all of God’s life is manifested perfectly, assumed a human nature taken from Adam. His nature was what St. Paul called “the likeness of sinful flesh.” His body and human soul had all the characteristics of corruptible flesh: He hungered, thirsted, skinned His knees, and experienced cutting off from other people. But because He was God by nature, at every step of the way, He communicated God’s activities to that human nature, thereby facilitating the possibility of a human person acting with God’s own activity. In assuming the whole human nature and in participating in every step of human life, He sanctified that nature and that life.

Because of the sin of Adam, death, suffering, and division came into the world. Christ participated in each element of this penalty. Like Adam from Eve, Christ experienced division from His own bride, His people. His closest friends left Him when He was most alone. His chosen people, Israel, spit on Him. He even experienced the consciousness of being abandoned by God, though, like the Psalmists, He knew that God was truly present. Like humanity, Christ suffered bloodshed, being nearly beaten to death before being nailed to a tree. And like humanity, incarnate Life shared in death itself, His soul being forcibly torn from His dead body.

That is the penalty for sin, and Christ took it. Because the Logos is naturally radiant with life, life was communicated to death, and death was turned back. Death is the most basic reality of the flesh, but there is a deeper magic still. The flesh was put to death in the death of Christ and the body was made alive in the Spirit.

What that means for us is that these penalties are suddenly turned to blessing. Just as the glorification of Jesus is the Cross, so also we are glorified when we suffer. When others reject us and spit upon us and mock us, this is our glory, because it is situated inside the divine incarnate one. When we are cut off from our closest friends, we come even closer to the Friend of Friends. And our death itself is turned to life. Christian death is no longer death. As the Revelation of John puts it, it is simply the “first resurrection.” And because Life has died and been raised from the dead, our bodies too will be raised, animated by the Holy Spirit, immortal and indestructible.

So is this a penalty? Yep.

Substitution? Yep.

I think the principal difference with popular evangelical accounts of penal substitution is the emphasis on Christ’s substitution for death, rather than eternal hell. Death sometimes gets shoved to the side in evangelical accounts of the atonement, where “eternal hell” is the real punishment for Adam’s transgression, even though Genesis 3 never mentions it. When considering what damnation is, we really ought to recognize that death is the primary reality: hell is the eternal realization of death. Just as Christian death is the “first resurrection” so the resurrection of the unbeliever is the “second death.” In the Bible, death refers to division. When Adam is put into a “deep sleep” and torn in two, this is a death which prepares him for greater life. When Abraham and Lot are cut off from each other, this is a death which prepares Abraham for a greater inheritance. When the soul and the body are cut off from one another, this is what we refer to as death, but in Christ it only paves the way to greater life.

Eternal death is death in the final, hopeless sense. It is a death which stands as the last word. Human nature is the common property of all human persons, and Christ communicated His divine activities to human nature. Hence, in the eschaton, those divine activities will be communicated to all persons, saved or not. This life is so that we might, through the Spirit, share in Christ’s life presently in order that our wills and activities be reoriented in the same direction that God’s will and activity is. If we think of every activity as a “switch” turned by our will, every switch has a corresponding divine switch. The goal is to turn each of the switches in the same direction, but damnation is when each of them are turned in opposite directions.

That is the most basic and most profound sort of tearing. The person is torn in two, because he shares divine and human activities perpetually warring with each other.

The other difference that I think this account of substitution has with Protestant accounts is the role of imputation. For many Protestants, the basis of Christ’s reception of the penalty is the imputation of our transgressions to His account. Because they are imputed to Him, God is just to punish Him in our place. It seems to me, however, that nothing more is necessary than for the Word to freely assume the “likeness of sinful flesh.” In doing so, He naturally assumes the weight of all of our debts and sinful flesh, and this makes Him capable of carrying these debts outside the camp and sending them off into the wilderness.