The Reformation brought about the penal substitutionary account of
atonement. (It has sometimes been claimed that penal substitution can be found
in the Church Fathers, but this is not the case. The Church Fathers do
sometimes include substitutionary language, but as part of a richer account of atonement
that is not equivalent to penal substitution.) This conflated Anselm’s
distinction between satisfaction and punishment, so that Christ is said to satisfy
God’s wrath with sin by standing in the place of fallen humanity, taking upon
himself the punishment due. This is a penal arrangement because it relates to God’s
moral law. It is also a substitution, because Christ stands in our place. By
his death he atones for human sin thereby offering satisfaction to God in place
of sinners. Some more recent accounts of penal substitution, aware of the
potential problems associated with claims that the innocent Christ is “punished”
for human sin, have suggested instead that Christ suffers only the penal consequences
of human sin. This means he takes upon himself what would have been punishment
if we were to serve it, but in his case is simply the harsh treatment we deserve
but he does not. Either way, this is a significant development out of a basically
Anselmian scheme, and one that remains hotly contested and defended in equal
measures. (Oliver Crisp, “Christology and the Atonement,” in The Cambridge Companion
to Christology, ed. Timothy J. Pawl and Michael L. Peterson [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2025], 225)
