Refuting the
thesis Irenaeus of Lyons taught penal substation, instead, opting for a model
he refers to as “nonpenal propitiation,” Joshua M. McNall wrote:
The suggestion hinges upon the fact that
Irenaeus occasionally spoke of Christ as “propitiating” (propitians) the Father on our behalf. Irenaeus wrote,
By transgressing [God’s] commandment we
became his enemies. And therefore in the last times the Lord has restored us
into friendship through his incarnation, having become “the mediator between
God and men”; propitiating for us the Father against whom we had sinned, and
cancelling our disobedience by his own obedience; conferring also upon us the
gift of communion with, and subjection to, our Maker. (Against Heresies 5.17.1).
A similar claim appears in book 4 of Against Heresies. Here, he wrote that
Jesus performed “the offices of the high priest, propitiating God for men . . .
Himself suffering death, that exiled man might go forth from condemnation”
(4.8.2).
Both passages clearly speak of propitiation,
and as the twentieth century demonstrated, that concept would become a flash
point. The English word and its Latin precursor (propitiation) refer to the placation, assuaging, removal, or
turning aside of divine wrath, often through a sacrifice or gift. Hence the
notion is important for those who claim that Jesus bore the weight of divine
wrath in our place. Yet while the meaning of the Latin word is clear enough,
scholars are divided over whether propitiation
is a proper rendering of the Hebrew and Greek words (most notably kipper and hilastērion) often used the describe atonement . . . But what of
Irenaeus? On the surface, his use of propitiation
appears to affirm a central contention of Morris and his interpretive kin.
When one speaks of expiation, the object is usually sin, while the object of
propitiation is God or divine wrath. In the above quotations, Irenaeus clearly
views God the Father as the object of the action. Thus Jesus’s high priestly
work is viewed as “propitiating for us the Father against whom we had sinned.”
Likewise, the thing requiring propitiation is the transgression by which we “became
[God’s] enemies” (Against Heresies 5.17.1).
The point, therefore, is not merely that Irenaeus spoke of propitiation but
that he made God the object because of our prior status as his enemies.
Yet there is an added wrinkle. While Irenaeus
wrote originally in Greek, the above passages exist today (as with most of his
work) in a later Latin translation. Hence one might claim that the propitiation
language reflects the mind of Irenaeus’s translator more than his own. Perhaps
partly because of this, John Lawson acknowledges that the use of propitians in the above passages only
appear to teach “Divine Appeasement.” The reasons given stem from the fact that
(1) Irenaeus did not normally speak of propitiation and (2) the original Greek
word may be given a biblical sense in which appeasement is not present. On the
latter point, Dodd’s shadow lingers in the background (John Lawson, The Biblical Theology of Saint Irenaeus [London:
Epworth, 1948], 193).
In response to Lawson, two points should be
made. First, it is certainly accurate to say that Irenaeus did not usually
speak of atonement as propitiation. Still, the fact that someone usually doesn’t do something is no
grounds for claiming that they never do it. Jesus usually walked on land, but
this is no proof that he never walked on water. Second, it is also true that
the meaning of hilastērion is
sometimes more akin to expiation than propitiation. But if this is so for
Irenaeus, then it seems singularly odd that both passages from Against Heresies identify the Father as
the one who is propitiated. If Lawson were correct, then Irenaeus should have
spoken of sin as the object of this action—but Irenaeus did not. In the end,
both objections to the conception of propitiation in Irenaeus (as the turning
away of divine wrath) seem unconvincing.
Of course, none of this means that Irenaeus
espoused a view of penal substitution in his references to divine propitiation.
Key parts of the doctrine are either missing or muted in these texts (Against Heresies 4.8.2; 5.17.1). Most
notably, the theme of punishment is entirely absent. And while cultic imagery
is present, Irenaeus pictured Jesus not as the sacrificial victim that absorbs divine wrath but as “the high priest,” who
propitiates God by “cleansing lepers” and “healing the sick” (Against Heresies 4.8.2). When Christ’s
death is mentioned, it is not viewed as a propitiatory sacrifice but as the
death of the high priest, which according to the law was the event that signaled
to certain exiled persons that they might return from their cities of refuge
without fear of punishment (Num 35:25) (Against
Heresies 4.8.2). A crucial distinction should therefore be noted: the
presence of sacrificial themes (including propitiation) in an author do not
necessarily reflect belief in penal substitution, and interpreters should avoid
the folly of finding penal substitution in every
reference to priests and sacrifices.
Elsewhere, however, Irenaeus did speak of
Christ redeeming us “by his blood” (Demonstration
of Apostolic Preaching, 72, 78, 88) just as he wrote that Jesus “gave
himself as a redemption for those who had been led into captivity” (Against Heresies 5.1.1). [Alongside his
theory of recapitulation where] Irenaeus even viewed as Christ summing up the
human death which was the divinely sanctioned penalty for sin “so that neither
should justice be infringed upon, nor should the handiwork of God go to
destruction” (Against Heresies 5.23.2).
These statements come much closer to penal substitutionary themes, even while
the emphasis is more representative than explicitly substitutionary. On Irenaeus, the verdict is therefore a “yes”
on propitiation and vicarious judgment, but a “no” on an explicit account of
penal substation. (Joshua M. McNall, The
Mosaic of Atonement: An Integrated Approach to Christ’s Work [Grand Rapids,
Mich.: Zondervan Academic, 2019], 109-110, 111-13, final comment in square
brackets added for clarification, emphasis in bold added)
