Scriptural Mormonism: Francis J. Hall (Anglican) vs. Forensic Justification and Penal Substitution

Book VI, Chapter 6, §2

The written Word is from the eternal Word. In the Old Testament, we have records of how God of old time “spake unto the fathers in many portions and in many manners,” thus preparing His chosen people for the time when He should speak directly in His Son-made-flesh (cf. Heb. 1:1-2). But every speech of God is mediated through the Son, who alone declares Him whom men cannot see (John 1:18). So it was the Son who revealed the true God in theophany and by angel to our first parents and to succeeding patriarchs. IT was He who revealed Yahweh to Moses at the burning bush (Exod. 3:1-6), and it was He who taught the law from Mount Sinai [Exod. 20:1-21]. All the statutes and judgments, and all the signs from God which Israel received, were mediated through Him, and the Word of God through the prophets was His Word. Moreover, it was through Him that the old covenant ritual, an expurgated development of pre-existing usages, obtained prefigurative value, and that Israel’s entire history was marked by a frequent emergence of types and parables pointing on to His final self-manifestation in flesh and to the setting up of His everlasting kingdom. Nor was the sphere of His prophetic office confined to the chosen people. All truth comes from God through the Word, and amid all the vagaries and superstitions which differentiated ancient religions form that of Israel, even at its lowest, these religions preserved, and gained their power of persistence from, truths which came from the Word—these truths being saved from utter extinction in pagan minds by the hidden operations of His Holy Spirit. (Francis J. Hall, Anglican Dogmatics, ed. John A. Porter, 2 vols. [Nashotah, Wis.: Nashotah House Press, 2021], 2:115)

Book VII, Chapter 1, §8

Pending further criticism at a later stage, we content ourselves at present with calling attention to certain errors. (a) The notion that Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us is unscriptural. According to St. Paul, it is our own faith that is thus imputed (Rom. 4:3-5), this faith being the beginning and potential principle of our becoming truly righteous. (b) Men are not passive recipients of salvation, but although redeemed by Christ’s death, and dependent for the possibility of salvation upon the grace of Christ, the actual working-out of salvation requires their own cooperation with this grace, and growth in righteousness, under the conditions provided by the Savior in His mystical body. (c) Although our Lord bore sufferings that for us are penal consequences of sin, there is no trace in Scripture of their being penal in His case, except as regarded from the erroneous standpoint of HIs persecutors. (d) In the redemptive aspects of His passions, He may be said to have “suffered in our stead,” but to develop this aspect into a formally-complete theory of substitution is to exaggerate it to the point of caricature. (e) The sixteenth-century doctrine of absolute predestination and particular redemption is not only unscriptural, but contradictory to biblical teaching concerning the will of God and the reality of human probation. (Francis J. Hall, Anglican Dogmatics, ed. John A. Porter, 2 vols. [Nashotah, Wis.: Nashotah House Press, 2021], 2:162-63)

This is especially so when substitutionary punishment is asserted, for neither was He punished, nor is our punishment wholly remitted. It is true that by redeeming grace our sufferings cease to be merely penal and become purificatory, as well, but they are not lifted until patience has completed her perfect work, and sin has been really abolished in us. (Ibid., 2:163 n. 1)

Book VII, Chapter 2, §1-2

§ 1. Forensic imputation. First of all, we ought to eliminate the nton that the God of truth and justice resorts to forensic imputation, whether of our guilt in Christ or of His righteousness to us. The presumption is overwhelming that a method of dealing with sin which appears untrue and immoral to men cannot be divine. It took a long time for Israel that “the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him” (Ezek. 18:20), and that what is needed is the turning of men from sin to righteousness. But what was so slowly learned by the ancients has become a Christian truism, which only needs to be reasonably stated, in order to be ratified by the moral judgment of all enlightened and unprejudiced Christian believers. The texts which are depended upon to prove the transfer of our guilt to Christ do not prove it, for they can be otherwise interpreted without doing violence to their meaning and reference. Christ was “made a curse for us” because He “hunt on the tree” and those who were thus treated [Deut. 21:22-23] were held to be under a curse (Gal. 3:13; cf. Isa. 53:4), that is, by men. There is no scriptural evidence that God’s own curse rested on Christ. IT is said that God “made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin” (2 Cor. 5:21), but the paradoxical form of the saying should preclude the radical inference that God transferred our guilt to Him. The thought is that God willed that Christ should be “reckoned amongst transgressors” (Mark 15:28; Luke 22:37), that is, by men, and should be crucified by those who thus regarded Him. It is safe to say that Christ was never more favorably regarded by His heavenly Father than when He was pouring forth His life for sinners. It is equally impossible to find in Scripture the notion that Christ’s righteousness is imputed to the unrighteous. The righteousness which St. Paul says is imputed to us is the righteousness of our own faith (Rom. 4:5), and this righteousness is not imputed by way of forensic transfer, but is based upon the fact that our faith constitutes a response to the grace of Christ which initiates the growth of His righteousness in us. This is confirmed by the statement that “through the obedience of one shall the many be made righteous” (5:19, 21; 6:1-14). Plainly, this does not mean that Christ’s obedience leads to our being regarded as righteous independently by our becoming so. Rather, it refers to the fact that by His obedience unto death, our Lord won for us the redeeming grace whereby, when we believe, we are enabled to imitate His righteousness. IT is a “making righteous,” not a forensic imputation of righteousness that is in view.

§ 2. Penal substitution. The notion of penal substitution is to be eliminated for similar reasons. The punishment of one who is not guilty, followed by exemption from punishment of the real sinners, appears on the face of it to be a parody of justice, and to violate the moral requirement that “the soul that sinneth it shall die” (Ezek. 18:4). The penalty of sin is twofold: (a) the temporary sufferings of men, which culminate in physical death, and (b) the death of the soul, or its final or permanent exclusion from the divine communion and fellowship for which man was made. The former penalty has not been removed by Christ’s death, and the latter was not endured by Him, its removal from us being caused not by any penal substitution but by our deliverance from sin, that is, by the redemptive value of His voluntary sacrifice for sin, and by the subsequent dispensation of saving grace for which His redemption has prepared the way. The penalties which penitent sinners do not escape cannot be remitted. This is so because justice, as perceived by the consciences of all sincere penitents, requires their infliction for accomplished sin. But the punishment of eternal death is remitted, because salvation from sin justly secures the termination of suffering, when previous sins have been sufficiently punished, and when the soul has acquired the righteousness which is pledged in its reconciliation to God. The only standpoint from which our Lord’s Passion is treated in Holy Scripture as penal—as His punishment—is the admittedly-false one of His persecutors and of sinful bystanders. The true idea can be seen in the much-misinterpreted prophetic evangel, “Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem Him . . . smitten of God. . . . But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our pace was upon Him; and with HIs tripes we are healed . . . and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all . . . For the transgression of my people was He stricken . . . IT pleased the Lord to bruise Him; He hath put Him to grief: when thou shalt make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed” (Isa. 53:4-10; cf. 2 Cor. 5:21; Gal. 3:13). Here we find that “the chastisement of our peace was upon Him,” that is, that by the will of God He endured sufferings and stripes which when he endured by us constitute our chastisement, but the sacred writer carefully avoids saying that they constituted chastisement to Him. To Him, they were our griefs and our sorrows, with which, obediently as a lamb, and as an offering for sin, He identified Himself in this sense, “taking upon Him our iniquities.” To Him, these sorrows became, indeed, uniquely intense, so that men “were astonished” at Him [Isa. 52:14], and “esteemed Him not” [53:3] but the interpretation of the prophet, that His soul was made “an offering for sin,” is not equivalent to the theory that He was punished. (Francis J. Hall, Anglican Dogmatics, ed. John A. Porter, 2 vols. [Nashotah, Wis.: Nashotah House Press, 2021], 2:168-70)

Book VII, Chapter 4, §4

His death not substitutionary, although vicarious. The words and phrases in the New Testament which have been used in support of substitution conceptions ought to be interpreted with regard not only to their immediate context, but also to the facts with which they have to do, and these facts are plainly inconsistent with penal substitution. [a] In the first place, our Lord’s death was not penal, but was a voluntary and meritorious sacrifice for Himself for the sins of others. [b] Secondly, the endless punishment of sin from which we escape by reason of His Passion He did not endure either in duration or in a kind, and the attempt to show that He bore the guilty pangs of the damned is hopeless. [c] Finally, the sufferings which HE did endure are sufferings in which we have to share, even to the point of physical death. His sufferings, in brief, do not take the place of our ours, but consecrate them, give them purificatory value, and thus make them—in this respect like His own—transitory. Nor do the facts justify our regarding the Redeemer as a moral substitute. [a] In the first place, the sins from which He came to redeem us were not transferred to Him, for there was no sin in Him, except in the wholly-false opinion of HIs persecutors. In brief, He did not become a sinner in our stead. [b] In the second place, He was not righteous in our stead, for the righteousness which He practiced constitutes Him our example, the imitation of which is the prerequisite of our salvation. What element of substitution is left? Surely, only relative aspects which should be called by a less absolute and misleading name. These aspects are partly redemptive and partly temporal. His sufferings stand alone in their redemptive value, and while they do not exempt us, His redeemed, from the obligation of taking up His Cross and suffering with Him, they do achieve a result which we could by no manner of means accomplish. Being unable to redeem ourselves, He redeemed us in our stead, and the biblical terms which seem to connote substitution are related not to HIs suffering in our stead, but to the unique and redemptive value of HIs Passion. He shared in our sufferings (Heb. 2:10-11, 17-18; 4:15; Matt. 8:17; 2 Cor. 1:5-7; Col. 1:24; 2 Tim. 2:10-12), but His sharing makes a difference which is incalculable. Then, there is the temporal aspect. At the time of doing it, what Christ did for us, He did alone (Isa. 59:16; Rom. 5:8-10). Our identification with Him and our full assimilation to Him are subsequent events, pending which He stands between us and God, as representing what we have not yet become, although as the surety of our becoming like Him by HIs grace. Thus, for the time being, and provisionally, God accepts Him in our stead, thereby giving us a footing which we have to make good by attaining to “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). In brief, because of what Christ is, our faith—a mere inception of righteousness—is provisionally imputed to us for the full-grown righteousness which we have yet to attain. (Francis J. Hall, Anglican Dogmatics, ed. John A. Porter, 2 vols. [Nashotah, Wis.: Nashotah House Press, 2021], 2:199-200)