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
