The ritual sacrifice contained in the first chapters of Leviticus was drawn up after and during the period of the second Temple. But the numerous developments dictated by sacerdotal casuistry, and the carefully regulated scale of compensation between the gravity of the fault and the price of the victim, can finally be traced down to the primitive and quite simple ideas we have just set forth As to the notion of penal substitution, of the exchange of the life and suffering of the victim for the life and suffering of the guilty, it never once appears.
A few remarks will help to establish the nature and significance of the rite of propitiation:-
1st. What propitiates God is the fact that He receives something that is agreeable to Him. One must flatter His tastes and please Him by showing Him that, in order to obtain His favour, one does not hesitate in bringing Him of one’s very best. The offering blots out the sin because it covers it; God’s eyes resting on the gift, no longer behold the fault. So it comes that each one offers what he has. If anyone is too poor to bring even two young pigeons, he shall bring for that wherein he hath sinned a small measure of fine flour for atonement (Lev. V.11). It is evident that what Leviticus understands by atonement is something quite other than what the theology of the Church means to-day. Since, in the sacrifice for sin, the blood may be replaced by fine flour, it is not doubtful that the blood was at first offered to God not on account of the penal suffering which it represented, but because, being the life itself, it belonged by right to God, the author of life, ad must ever be given up to Him (Lev. xvii. 11) . . . This twofold identification is more than a metaphor; it is the miracle of grace and faith. Hence it follows that the death on Calvary, caused by the sin of all, is repeated in the soul of the sinner, by faith on account of his own sin. Such is the profound manner in which Paul understood the repentance to which the prophets and Jesus promise the forgiveness of sins. Death with Christ is, for the individual sinner, the way he expiates sin; that is to say, the way he bears the penalty and consequently is absolved. The great benefit of Christ to sinful men, who repent and believe, is not therefore, as in the theology of Anselm, that He exempts them by dying in their stead, but, on the contrary, that He enables them to die with Him and personally to bear in Him the penalty of their sin. The law which punishes sin by death has therefore produced for them its full effect; the law has exercised its right to the very utmost, but by so doing has become of none effect, and the sentence of condemnation renders itself void, those who came under it escaping through death and the law itself ceasing to have dominion over them.
But this is not all. Having died with Christ by faith, the sinner, now a new creature in Him, rises with Him, by faith, to a new life, the life of the Spirit. He is a new creature, in other words, a new creation of that Spirit which raised Christ and raises the dead: καινη κτισις, εν καινοτητι, ζωης, πνευματος (2 Cor. v. 17; Rom. vi. 4, vii. 6, viii.1-10). Hence we see the value and importance of the fact of the resurrection of Christ, in Hi work of redemption. It was no less necessary than the death itself, for the latter would leave us in death; it is the resurrection that introduces us into life, and, by putting an end to the period of the reign of the law, of sin and of flesh, inaugurates the period of the Spirit and of eternal life: ὃς παρεδόθη διὰ τὰ παραπτώματα ἡμῶν καὶ ἠγέρθη διὰ τὴν δικαίωσιν ἡμῶν (Rom. iv. 25). It is this aspect of the redemptive value of the resurrection of Christ that constitutes the originality of the Pauline theory and forbids its being confounded with any other. In reality, the right expression to be used here is not substitution, but mutual identification.
The historical drama of the death and resurrection of Christ is an external drama without value or incomplete, as you will, except in so far as it is morally reproduced by faith in the consciousness of the Christian. Strictly speaking, it is not Christ who expiates the sins of humanity; humanity expiates in Him its own sins, by dying to satisfy the demands of the law, and by rising again, a new creation, at the call of Him who raises the dead.
(Auguste Sabatier, The Doctrine of the Atonement And Its Historical Evolution [London: Williams & Norgate, 1904], 24-26; 46-48)
