I would hope that anyone reading the title of this post
would consider the suggested question nothing short of blasphemy. For those who
don’t know, there are Christians who do give an affirmative answer to this
question. While you might be thinking this is some fringe group, you will
probably be shocked to find the groups who affirm this are Protestants of the
Lutheran and Reformed (Calvinist) traditions.
The following quotes are from well respected Protestant
teachers, going all the way back to Luther Himself:
We should remember
that Christ’s suffering in His human nature, as He hung on the cross those six
hours, was not primarily physical, but mental and spiritual. When He cried out,
“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,” He was literally suffering the
pangs of hell. For that is essentially what hell is, separation from God,
separation from everything that is good and desirable. Such suffering is beyond
our comprehension. But since He suffered as a divine-human person, His
suffering was a just equivalent for all that His people would have suffered in
an eternity in hell.
(Boettner, Loraine. “The Reformed Faith.” Chapter 3.)
To [Jesus] was
imputed the guilt of their sins, and He was suffering the punishment for those
sins on their behalf. And the very essence of that
punishment was the outpouring of God’s wrath against sinners. In
some mysterious way during those awful hours on the cross, the Father poured out the full measure of His wrath against sin,
and the recipient of that wrath was God’s own beloved Son.
In this lies the true meaning of the cross.
(MacArthur, John. “The Murder of Jesus.” Page 219.)
Christ died in our place and in our stead – and He
received the very same outpouring of divine wrath in all its fury that we
deserved for our sin. It was a punishment so severe that a mortal
could spend all eternity in the torments of hell, and still he would not have
begun to exhaust the divine wrath that was heaped on Christ at the cross.
This was the true measure of Christ’s sufferings on the cross. The physical pains of crucifixion – dreadful as they were – were
nothing compared to the wrath of the Father against Him. The
anticipation of this was what had caused Him to sweat blood in the garden. This
is why He looked ahead to the cross with such horror. We cannot begin to fathom
all that was involved in paying the price of our sin. It’s sufficient to
understand that all our worst fears about the horrors of hell – and more – were
realized by Him as He received the due penalty of others’ wrongdoing.
And in that awful, sacred hour, it was as if the Father abandoned Him. Though
there was surely no interruption in the Father’s love for Him as a Son, God nonetheless turned away from Him and forsook Him as our
substitute.
( Ibid., Page 220-221)
Nothing had been done if Christ had only endured
corporeal death. In order to interpose between
us and God’s anger, and satisfy his righteous judgment, it was necessary that
he should feel the weight of divine vengeance. Whence also it was necessary
that he should engage, as it were, at close quarters with the powers of hell
and the horrors of eternal death. … … Hence there is nothing strange
in its being said that he descended to hell, seeing he endured the death which
is inflicted on the wicked by an angry God. It is frivolous and ridiculous to
object that in this way the order is perverted, it being absurd that an event
which preceded burial should be placed after it. But after
explaining what Christ endured in the sight of man,
the Creed appropriately adds the invisible and
incomprehensible judgment which he endured before God, to teach us that not
only was the body of Christ given up as the price of redemption, but that there
was a greater and more excellent price—that he bore in his soul the tortures of
condemned and ruined man. (Calvin, John. “Institutes of the Christian
Religion.” Book 3:Chapter 16.
The penalty of the
divine law is said to be eternal death. Therefore if Christ suffered
the penalty of the law He must have suffered death eternal; or, as
others say, He must have endured the same kind of
sufferings as those who are cast off from God and die eternally are called upon
to suffer. (Hodge, Charles. “Systematic Theology.” Vol. 2, Part 3,
Ch 6, Sec 3)
Luther: ‘Christ himself suffered the dread and horror of a distressed
conscience that tasted eternal wrath;’ ‘it was not a game, or a
joke, or play-acting when he said, “Thou hast forsaken me”; for then he felt himself really forsaken in all things even as a
sinner is forsaken” (Werke, 5. 602, 605) (Packer, J.I. “The Logic of Penal
Substitution.” footnote 44)
So then, gaze at the
heavenly picture of Christ, who descended into hell
for your sake and was forsaken by God as one eternally damned when
he spoke the words on the cross, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!” – “My God, my
God, why hast thou forsaken me?” In that picture your hell is defeated and your
uncertain election is made sure. (Luther, Martin. “Treatise on Preparing to
Die.”)
The physical pain of
the crucifixion and the [psychological] pain of taking on himself the absolute
evil of our sins were aggravated by the fact that Jesus faced this pain alone.
… Yet more difficult than these three previous aspects of Jesus’ pain was the pain of bearing the wrath of God upon himself. As Jesus
bore the guilt of our sins alone, God the Father, the mighty Creator, the Lord
of the universe, poured out on Jesus the fury of his wrath:
Jesus became the object of the intense hatred of sin and vengeance against sin
that God had patiently stored up since the beginning of the
world.(Grudem, Wayne. “Bible Doctrine.” Page 253-254)
“What prevents us
from seeing God is our heart. Our impurity. But Jesus had no impurity. And
Thomas said He was pure in heart. So obviously He had some, some experience of
the beauty of the Father. Until that moment that my sin was placed upon Him.
And the one who was pure was pure no more. And God cursed Him. It was if there
was a cry from Heaven – excuse my language but I can be no more accurate than
to say – it was as if Jesus heard the words ‘God damn you’, because that’s
what it meant to be cursed, to be damned, to be under the anathema of the
Father. As I said I don’t understand that, but I know that it’s
true.” (R.C. Sproul. Together for the Gospel. April 17, 2008. Louisville, KY.
Session V – The Curse Motif of the Atonement. Minute 55:01)
“Hell is all about
echoing faintly the glory of Calvary. That’s the meaning of hell in this room
right now. To help you feel in some emotional measure the magnificence of what Christ did for you when he bore not only your eternal
suffering, but millions of people’s eternal suffering when His Father put our
curse on Him. What a Saviour is echoed in the
flames of hell. So that’s what I mean when I say hell is an
echo of the glory of God, and an echo of the Savior’s sufferings, and therefore
an echo of the infinite love of God for our souls.” (John Piper. Resolved
Conference 2008. Session 8 – The Echo and Insufficiency of Hell. Min 40:00)
“This moment in Mark
chapter 15 [i.e. “My God, my God”], it is this moment, it is what takes place
in this moment that delivers us from hell. This agony, this scream, is what
delivers all those who turn from their sin and trust in the Savior from hell. On the cross, Jesus experienced hell for us. He experienced hell
for us, bearing God’s wrath and eternal punishment. And because
He did, Heaven awaits all those who turn from their sin and trust in Him. He screamed the ‘scream of the damned’ [i.e., “forsaken me”] for us. Listen, this scream should be our scream.
… This scream should be my eternal scream. He takes upon Himself my sin, the
wrath I deserved for and against my sin, He screams the ‘scream of the damned’
for me.” (C.J. Mahaney. Resolved Conference 2008. Session 11 – The Cry From the
Cross. Min 46:35)
“There are four ways
that you can measure the love of God in Christ heard in the ‘scream of the
damned’ … and all four of them are infinite, and they all point to the infinite
value of the ‘scream of the damned’. Now it’s bigger than this, and the quote
you just heard from ‘Spectacular Sins’ is my effort to get at it. Hell exists,
sin exists, Heaven exists, cross exists, everything exists to magnify the worth
of the ‘scream of the damned‘. Everything. That’s the point of
the universe.” (John Piper. Resolved Conference 2008. Session 12 – The Triumph
of the Gospel in the New Heavens and New Earth. Min 00:15)
The quotes are very clear, these famous Protestant
pastors and theologians believe Jesus received the punishments which the sinner
deserved, including both physical death and hellfire. They teach God the Father
poured out His wrath on His Son Jesus, which means Jesus underwent the
equivalent of hell and was effectively damned as a sinner is damned.
Why would someone affirm such a blasphemous teaching?
What most don’t know is that Jesus getting damned in our place is the heart of
Sola Fide. That’s right, the doctrine of justification by faith alone requires
this. Sola Fide teaches that by faith the sinner receives the righteousness of
Christ, while acknowledging Christ received the punishment the sinner deserved.
This teaching of Jesus getting damned in place of the sinner is popularly
termed “Penal Substitution.” If this doctrine is false, then Sola Fide
collapses. Martin Luther realized this, and all other Protestant theologians
since then recognized this as well.
The root of the problem is the starting assumption that
Sola Fide is true, because once that is assumed, whatever doctrines are
necessary to hold up Sola Fide will have to be affirmed in turn. If this means
the Father damned His Beloved Son, then (as we have unfortunately seen) there
will be people who have little trouble believing this.
While we could spend time refuting this abomination from
Scripture, our Christian consciences should be a sufficient guide in telling us
something this outrageous and blasphemous cannot be true. (Jay Dyer, “Quotes from Calvinist
Theologians Proving Arian/Nestorianism,” in Essays on Theology and
Philosophy [Samizdat Press, 2019], 303-6)
