Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 27:3 (Fall 2023)
Article: The Son As Object Of All That The Father Is: Trinity And Penal Substitutionary Atonement
Author: Amos Peck

SBJT 27:3 (Fall 2023) p. 32

The Son As Object Of All That The Father Is: Trinity And Penal Substitutionary Atonement

Amos Peck

Amos Peck is a PhD student at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan. He earned his Masters of Divinity and Masters of Theology from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky. Amos lives with his wife, Kellen, and their three children in Louisville, Kentucky and is a deacon at Kenwood Baptist Church.

As aptly noted by Joshua M. McNall in The Mosaic of Atonement, the presence of divine authority and sanction standing behind Christ’s bearing of a penalty for sin is “the most controversial aspect of penal substitution.”1 If the proper way of understanding divine authority and sanction in the atonement is a lightning rod, the further question of whether the Son bears the wrath of the Father is the tip of that lightning rod. On one side of the spectrum are proponents of penal substitutionary atonement (hereafter PSA) who hold that the Father directs the wrath due to sinners upon Christ who propitiates the Father as their substitute. The strongest rhetorical objections to this view have come from the social critiques of Feminist and Liberation theology, decrying PSA for depicting God as a “divine sadist” who “paraded [Christ’s abuse] as salvific” while perpetuating abuse cycles by idealizing the silent victim since “the child who suffers ‘without even raising a voice’ is lauded as the hope of the world.”2 While emotive descriptions of PSA as “cosmic child abuse” are increasingly commonplace,3 there are also substantive theological critiques offered from the direction of other atonement models, foremost of which is an appeal to divine unity. P. S. Fiddes argues that PSA is destructive of the harmony, mutuality, and unity of the Godhead because it involves

SBJT 27:3 (Fall 2023) p. 33

one divine person acting individually towards another which implies the separability of the persons as different subjects.

One of the problems of a theory of penal substitution is that it depends for its logic upon a strong individualization of Father and Son as independent subjects… Advocates of the theory of propitiation may insist that the Father is in effect propitiating himself through sending the Son to die, since he is one in will and love with the Son, but the logic of both Calvin and Anselm is that the satisfaction must be offered by a man (the human nature of Christ) to God, since it is man who has failed in honour or law-keeping. Thus one cannot avoid speaking of a propitiat...