Sunday, November 15, 2020

Blake Ostler, "Does Mormonism Add Anything to the Penal-Substitution Theory?"

  

Does Mormonism Add Anything to the Penal-Substitution Theory?

 

Mormon discussions of atonement usually assume the Penal-Substitution Theory (PST) that is the mainstay of evangelical thought (see, for example, Hyrum L. Andrus, God, Man, and the Universe, chs. 15 and 165; Boyd K. Packer, “The Mediator”; Ronald A. Heiner, “The Necessity of a Sinless Messiah,” 5-30). This theory maintains that sin is like a debt that someone must pay, and so Christ pays it as a third-party benefactor. This payment is made by Christ because he has amassed super-abundant credit to his mortal life. God’s justice is seen as necessarily retributive in nature so that someone has to be punished to satisfy God’s just nature. However, for some inexplicable reason, it doesn’t have to be the sinner that is punished for his or her own sins. Rather, someone else can be punished to satisfy the demands of justice. Thus, the father punishes Christ in our place.

 

However, there are numerous problems with PST. These problems include:

 

1. It erroneously assumes that justice is a personified platonic absolute that makes demands;

2. It posits a conflict between the wrathful Father who must be persuaded by his living Son not to punish us;

3. It erroneously assumes that it is just to punish an innocent person in the place of a guilty person;

4. It assumes that guilt and righteousness can be imputed or transferred from a guilty person to an innocent person and vice versa;

5. It provides no reason that guilt must be punished and why God cannot just forgive us without requiring a third-party who committed no sin to suffer;

6. It erroneously analogizes sin to a monetary debt.

 

. . . However, the question remains: Does Mormon though have the resources to explain or mitigate these problems with the Penal Substitution Theory? Hyrum Andrus provides perhaps the most sophisticated version of PST in Mormon writings. He argues:

 

As a divine being, Christ made an infinite sacrifice in order to pay the debt of sin and give life and truth and light to man . . . The doctrine of the atonement as expressed in Latter-day revelation is centered in the immutable requirements of eternal law. The Nephite prophet Alma taught that both penalty and reward are established for each law that God ordains, and that each penalty and reward must be “eternal as the life of the soul.” Otherwise, neither justice nor mercy could have “claim on the creature.” . . . To satisfy the demands of divine justice and institute a plan of mercy, an atonement had to be made. The Father is a God of justice; and justice had to be paid. The Father’s will in this regard had to be fulfilled. The honor and integrity of the Man of Holiness had to be sustained . . . Justice required the Father to cause the chosen redeemer to suffer. It had to be; truth and consistency made it so. Having fulfilled the will of the Father, Jesus therefore declared: “I have drunk of that bitter cup which the Father hath given me, and have glorified the Father in taking upon me the sins of the world, in which I have suffered the will of the Father in all things from the beginning” (3 Ne. 11:11; see also John 18:11). (Andrus, God, Man and the Universe, 396-97)

 

To this point in Andrus’s discussion, he offers a straight-forward argument based on assumptions in PST. He smuggles in the notion that “Justice had to be paid,” even though not a single Mormon scripture mentions anything about a money payment in connection with atonement. He posits that the “demands of justice” require that someone must suffer for sin—even if it is not the person who is guilty of that sin. There is nothing here to distinguish the discussion from the standard PST. He even drops in the Anselm’s notion that God’s honor demands payment to be satisfied. None of these assertions have any scriptural backing.

 

However, Andrus makes a subsidiary argument that differs from traditional PST. Andrus argues, “For Jesus to take upon Himself the consequences of sin required that he suffer spiritual death for all men, and to this end the Spirit of God was withdrawn from him” (Andrus, 441). Spiritual death in Mormon thought means to be fully cut off from God’s presence. Andrus also argues that such withdrawal of the Spirit was necessary to test Jesus’s

 

integrity commensurate with the light and truth he had received from His Father . . . [T]he withdrawal of spiritual powers enabled Christ to descend below all things so that He could comprehend all things, and thereby obtain experience and prepare Himself to rescue the fulness of the Father’s glory in the resurrection. Having acquired the fulness of the Father’s glory, Jesus could then develop in their fulness the divine attributes and powers of truth, and light, and life in others . . . [I]n His earthly experience, Jesus learned by direct contact with mortal weakness and spiritual darkness how to succor his people. (Andrus, 441-42)

 

The notion that the Atonement was necessary for Christ’s growth and experience is revolutionary. Rather than a self-sufficient God who dispenses supererogatory merit to others so that the Father regards them as righteous then they are really sinners, Christ’s suffering is a learning experience to enable him to empathize with broken humans. The notion that Christ suffered spiritual death—that he was completely cut off from the Fathers—is also fairly novel. Andrus follows Brigham Young, who taught that God withdraw his spirit from Jesus in the moment of greatest agony and need so that Christ could lean from his trials to the greatest extent conceivable (Andrus, 441). However, these observations by Andrus suggest an approach to the atonement radically different from PST and not merely an amendment or addition to it. Andrus’s observation suggest a kenotic view of atonement in which Christ empties himself of the fulness of the divine glory to experience firsthand the vicissitudes of mortal life. The fact that Christ’s capacity to succor his people increased because he gained experiential knowledge of the depth of human pain and suffering entails that Christ’s capacities to love us were increased by the Atonement rather than merely our capacity to repent and be forgiven. I believe that Andrus offered valuable insights into the nature of Christ’s atonement—however, those insights have nothing to do with paying a debt of sin owed by another to the Father. (Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought, Volume 4: God’s Plan to Heal Evil [Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2020], 191-93, emphasis added)

 

Further Reading

 

Response to a Recent Attempt to Defend Imputed Righteousness


Critique of "The Christ Who Heals"