What Did The Cross Achieve? -- By: J. I. Packer

Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 25:1 (NA 1974)
Article: What Did The Cross Achieve?
Author: J. I. Packer


What Did The Cross Achieve?

The Logic of Penal Substitution

J. I. Packer

The Tyndale Biblical Theology Lecture, 1973*

* Delivered at Tyndale House, Cambridge, on July 17th, 1973.

The task which I have set myself in this lecture is to focus and explicate a belief which, by and large, is a distinguishing mark of the word-wide evangelical fraternity: namely, the belief that Christ’s death on the cross had the character of penal substitution, and that it was in virtue of this fact that it brought salvation to mankind. Two considerations prompt my attempt. First, the significance of penal substitution is not always stated as exactly as is desirable, so that the idea often gets misunderstood and caricatured by its critics; and I should like, if I can, to make such misunderstanding more difficult. Second, I am one of those who believe that this notion takes us to the very heart of the Christian gospel, and I welcome the opportunity of commending my conviction by analysis and argument.

My plan is this: first, to clear up some questions of method, so that there will be no doubt as to what I am doing; second, to explore what it means to call Christ’s death substitutionary; third, to see what further meaning is added when Christ’s substitutionary suffering is called penal; fourth, to note in closing that the analysis offered is not out of harmony with learned exegetical opinion. These are, I believe, needful preliminaries to any serious theological estimate of this view.

I. Mystery And Model

Every theological question has behind it a history of study, and narrow eccentricity in handling it is unavoidable unless the history is taken into account. Adverse comment on the concept of penal substitution often betrays narrow eccentricity of this kind. The two main historical points relating to this idea are, first, that Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Melanchthon and their reforming contemporaries were the pioneers in stating it and, second, that the arguments brought against it in 1578 by the Unitarian Pelagian, Faustus Socinus, in his brilliant polemic

De Jesu Christo Servatore (Of Jesus Christ the Saviour)1 have been central in discussion of it ever since. What the Reformers did was to redefine satisfactio (satisfaction), the main mediaeval category for thought about the cross. Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo?, which largely determined the mediaeval development, saw Christ’s satisfactio for our sins as the offering of compensation or damages for dishonour done, but the Reformers saw it as t...

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