Is Substitutionary Atonement Just a Type of "Cosmic Child Abuse" That Christians Came Up With in the Middle Ages?

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​Did you ever think you'd be living in a day when believing in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus' blood would be controversial among Christians? Welcome to 2018, when saying "Jesus died for my sins" is considered at best a pagan idea (1) and at worst "psychologically damaging" to children.  

What did Jesus accomplish on the cross? This is possibly the most important question a Christian can ask. Did He go to the cross in order to take the punishment of our sins upon Himself? To bring us into an adoptive relationship with God the Father? To ransom us to God? To set a moral example for us to follow? To victoriously defeat sin and death?

The answer? Yes! To all of the above. Scripture uses all kinds of different language and metaphors to describe the atoning work of Jesus, and a complete picture of the cross will only be found in considering all of them.

For example, prior to the 1800’s, when theologians talked about the cross, they generally didn't narrow it down to just one thing. Dallas Theological Seminary Professor Glenn Kreider noted that they were "like poets unpacking how beautiful an event this is."  However, in more modern times, one atonement theory in particular is under attack.

First, let's define some terms.

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What is atonement?

Theologian Wayne Grudem defines the atonement as "the work Christ did in his life and death to earn our salvation."(2) The word itself breaks down into three parts: at-one-ment. Put simply, atonement is how we are brought into "oneness" with God through Jesus.

​The primary understanding of the atonement throughout Scripture and church history is what is called substitutionary atonement, sometimes referred to as vicarious atonement. This is the idea that when Jesus died on the cross, He took our place—that He died instead of us….as a substitute. But the Bible doesn't talk about Jesus only as substitute—it  also talks about Him paying the penalty for our sin. This is what is referred to as penal substitutionary atonement (PSA).

Many Christians, including myself, would consider the doctrine of PSA to be central to the gospel. Although this isn't the only way to understand the atonement, it is one way that is fundamental to salvation, and essential to the historic Christian faith.

But isn't PSA something that was first thought up in the Middle Ages?

Often when discussing the atonement, someone will bring up the challenge that PSA was not something the earliest Christians believed…that it was a later invention of Anselm of Canterbury in the Middle Ages.

What Anselm introduced in his work, Cur Deus Homo, was not the classic understanding of PSA, even though the two are often conflated and/or confused. While PSA states that Jesus paid the penalty for sin by dying in the place of sinners, Anselm's theory had more to do with God's offended honor and dignity being satisfied in the sacrifice of Jesus—that is referred to as penal satisfaction. They go together, but they aren't the same thing.  

The doctrine of PSA is all overboth Old and New Testaments, as well as the early church fathers. It is decidedly the very essence of Christianity.

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Cosmic child abuse?

Recent efforts by several Progressive Christian writers have sought to vilify the idea of substitutionary atonement, characterizing it as a misunderstanding of the cross. Even though he doesn’t deny a broader definition of substitutionary atonement, Steve Chalke describes the “cosmic child abuse” of PSA in his book The Lost Messsage of Jesus as:

….a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed. Understandably, both people inside and outside of the Church have found this twisted version of events morally dubious and a huge barrier to faith. Deeper than that, however, is that such a concept stands in total contradiction to the statement: "God is love". (3)

There are a couple of problems with this view. First, to portray Jesus as some sort of helpless "victim" of the Father is to misunderstand the nature of the Trinity. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are One. Jesus wasn't a defenseless casualty of divine wrath…He IS God. He, as God, became flesh and laid His life down of His own will (John 10:18). It's actually the reason He came to earth.

Secondly, PSA involves God's wrath, and to modern readers, this idea can seem terribly intolerant. But it is entirely biblical, and is actually very good news when we understand His love, justice, and holiness, and mercy.

I once met a woman who had been horribly abused by her father when she was a child. He was mean, vindictive, and seemed to even take pleasure in her pain. Understandably, whenever she heard language referencing God’s wrath or anger, she winced—all she could think of was the senseless and petty “wrath” of her earthly father. We humans have the tendency to confuse the sinful abuse of some of our earthly fathers with the perfect justice and mercy of a God who is, by His very essence, love.  

God’s wrath is not petty or spiteful—it is just, holy, and loving. In the words of Derek Rishmawy:  

God’s wrath is not some irrational flare-up of anger and foaming hatred. Wrath is God’s settled, just attitude of opposition towards all that defaces creation. It is his stance and judgment of displeasure towards sin, as well as his will to remove it.
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The wrath of God does not contradict His love—He has wrath because of His love. Theologian Miroslav Volf realized this after witnessing the horrors of the Bosnian war:

In 1 Corinthians 1:18, Paul said, "For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." The message of the cross is "foolishness" to unbelievers. It was true then, and it is still true now. The Penal Substitutionary Atonement of Jesus was not a late invention, nor is it some type of cosmic child abuse. It is the heart of the gospel—and that is indeed "Good News!"

​References: 

(1) Rob Bell wrote about this in his book, Love Wins, and jokingly referred to atonement theory as "God is less grumpy because of Jesus" in this lecture.
​(2) Grudem, Wayne, Systematic Theology, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan 1994) p. 568
(3) Chalke, Steve and Mann, Alan, The Lost Message of Jesus, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003), pp. 182-183
(4) Volf, Miroslav, Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, (Zondervan 2005) pp. 138-139

If a soldier throws himself onto a grenade to save his comrades he is, rightly, labeled a hero. He is not called a vengeful, bloodthirsty child abuser.

God takes the full blast of the wages of sin himself to save us and …..

Perhaps part of the problem is that the price He paid shows the truth about our sin.

You knocked it out off the park again sister! Keep on fighting the good fight and exposing the Christian Kool-aid drinkers!

Yes, but in this case – God is both the one throwing the grenade and then throwing himself on the grenade. I wouldn’t call that heroic, more like stupidity. Also, considering the fact that the punishment for our sins is supposedly eternal damnation, how could Jesus have paid the full price for all of our sins when he only suffered for a day and then was raised to life again a few days later? Seems like he got off pretty easy. Not only that, but if Jesus is God, how could he have ever truly died? The body that henincarnated into could die but Christ himself could not die if he has always existed from beginning to end.

I think many could consider it Cosmic Child Abuse IF Jesus were a mere man, but you rightly make the point, considering the divinity of Christ and equality within the Godhead, people really miss the idea of God Himself bearing our sins and our punishment. We are the children saved by our heroic heavenly Father. Now thats good parenting.

I will be pondering this. I appreciate your work and this post raises alot of questions for me. I just can't find a way to ask any right now without sounding contrary.

Thanks Dan, your comment made me laugh and encouraged me.

'Cosmic child abuse' is a strawman used by uninformed atheists. I can't imagine any even moderately biblicly literate Christian using the phrase. Jesus is not God's child. Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the exact representation of his being and all the fullness of the Godhead dwelt in him bodily.
As we know Jesus said " if you see me you've seen the father."
The topic of atonement fascinates me. In a very real sense it is the center of our faith, and yet there is little agreement on what actually happened on the cross. You are correct that it is likely much more than one thing, and possibly all of the theories speak to different aspects of the truth. There are, however questions I have about PSA.
*Doesn't God forgive sin?
Say I owe someone money that I can't pay back, if i dont pay there will be terrible consequences. My friend offers to pay the debt. I am grateful to my friend for sure, but my debtor did not forgive me, he got his payment.
* Does God use violence to solve the problem of sin?
Jesus was not violent, so if he and the father are one, then the father is not violent.

Eric,

What is a son, if not a male child?

But regardless, saying that God abused Jesus is not a straw man for the simple reason that it's not a position being ascribed to Christians. We know you don't think God abused Jesus. Rather, that God abused Jesus is a *consequence* of Christian doctrine.

So, I would say it counts as child abuse, sure. God had no good reason to have Jesus tortured and killed. But that's exactly what he did.

And I don't buy Alisa's attempt at justification. She claims that God had Jesus tortured and killed to (1) punish Jesus for our sins, (2) adopt us, (3) ransom us (whatever that means), (4) set a moral example, (5) defeat sin (again, whatever that means), and (6) defeat death (which I assume just means raise a dead person to life).

But none of these reasons make much if any sense.why punish Jesus for our sins? And how is torturing Jesus a prerequisite for adopting us? (Aren't we already God's children anyway?) How is having Jesus tortured and killed a moral example? (Isn't it rather an example of *immorality*?) And didn't he already raise people from the dead?

Anyway, those are just my thoughts.

Ben, the Bible constantly uses images, parables, and analogies taken from the finite world to describe the infinite. Hence, they cannot always be pressed too literally. You may say well then how can we know how literally we should take an image or not? We know it from Scripture because it always gives us more than enough information to come to a full doctrine regarding any given image. The same is true when the second person of the Trinity is called "Son." We have more than enough information to conclude that this is not meant literally. You may ask, then why use the image at all? The reason is because it tells us a great deal about the second person of the Trinity. For example, it tells us that He shares the same nature with the first person of the Trinity as do biological human sons with their biological fathers. Humans beget humans and God beget God. So your statement, "what is a son, if not a male child?" is completely vacuous.

And your statement regarding the actual doctrine vs. the *consequence* of the doctrine betrays an almost complete ignorance of historical theology. Christians throughout our history have always maintained that we do not believe one can make the disjunction between explicit statements and good and necessary inferences that people often want to make. We have always been firm that a doctrine includes all that is explicitly spelled out within it and also all that it necessarily implies. Therefore, countless liberal and progressive theologians throughout the last well over 100 years have accused the biblical doctrine of PSA of being inherently a doctrine that is teaching cosmic child abuse based upon centuries of Christian teaching that one is responsible for the necessary inferences that flow from one's doctrine. We strongly disagree with the conclusion that this is a necessary inference from our teaching, but we agree with the principle that we are responsible for the legitimate necessary inferences that flow from our doctrine. Hence, this accusation of cosmic child abuse is regularly ascribed to our doctrine, but it is a straw man because it is based on assumptions that are not actually a part of the true doctrine. And even if for the sake of argument I were to agree that this accusation isn't being directly lodged against our doctrine, but is simply saying that it is a consequence of it, this argument is still a straw man because the only way to come to this conclusion is by advocating assumptions that again are not part of the doctrine as you do as you proceed in your comment.

You say that it counts as child abuse for sure because God had no good reason to have Jesus tortured and killed but that's what he did anyway. This statement, with all due respect, is about as incoherent as it gets. As an atheist you clearly don't believe God actually did this because you strongly don't believe God even exists. Hence, you must mean it in the sense that according to our doctrine God did this. But you clearly have no interest in even understanding our doctrine because as I state in your very first statement you clearly make no attempt to deal with the historic Christian doctrine of the Sonship of the second person of the Trinity. If God had some male human child along the lines of how pagan gods had human children and then proceeded to take his capricious wrath out upon this mere human being then yes cosmic child abuse would be involved. But again, as has been said, this is just straw man argumentation. The Christian doctrine states that God is a just and holy God that utterly hates sin and Alisa gave a fantastic presentation on why this is eminently reasonable. God cannot simply let sin off the hook. So God most certainly did have every reason to punish His Son in our place. And there is nothing unjust or unreasonable about this method as the Son is God Himself and voluntarily and willingly took this punishment. No one, not even the Father in a sense, made Him do it. And the Father is hardly simply skirting the issue by passing the buck to the Son; the Father loves the Son with infinite love and is giving Him up for us. But the decision to do so is one in which both members of the Godhead are completely united and so there is nothing that comes even remotely close to cosmic child abuse.

You don't have to buy Alisa's arguments, but you absolutely will be called to the carpet if you make no attempt to actually deal with the actual arguments she is making sir. At every point in your next two paragraphs you show such a lack of understanding for historic Christian theology I cannot for the life of me understand why you would come on this website and present a comment with such confidence on issues which you clearly have no comprehension.

Our sins deserve punishment. In that sense we are in debt to God. God pays the debt in our place through His Son and so in that sense He has ransomed us from our sins. Again, the analogy is not to be pressed too far, it is an analogy or image taken from comm

God did not punish Jesus! Jesus as part of God chose to lay down his life to make us right with the Father. Jesus even says no one takes my life from me I lay it down. He chose to lay down his earthly life. He chose to leave heaven so that we could be brought in!

You are so welcome Eric, that was its intent! I won't say too much about your questions and comments since Alisa did such a great job of addressing them. The only thing I would say is that I agree that no true Christian would ever call the biblical doctrine of the atonement cosmic child abuse. But believe me when I say that countless professing Christians call it this very thing and this is terribly troubling. Thanks!

Dan,

Thank you for the response. I regret that it seems we are coming from two very different points of view and I am not optimistic we will be able to find much common ground. But hopefully I am mistaken and we will both get something out of our exchange. I guess we'll see.

Anyway, I freely acknowledge that I am ignorant of a lot of Christian theology. I don't have a lot of respect for it and so I don't spend much time reading about it. But do you not think it's possible to understand the basic tenets of Christianity without being an expert in the history of Christian theology? That's all I'm talking about here.

I gave a brief overview of why I disagreed with Alisa. As for punishing sin, God doesn't always do that according to Christianity. Instead, he forgives many sinners and takes them with him to Heaven. But he didn't have to have Jesus tortured and killed in order to do this. It is perfectly within his power to forgive people without torturing an innocent man.

Of course, Christians want to come up with reasons that the torture was somehow necessary. But I'm saying that, to the extent that I am familiar with them at least, none of those reasons track. Certainly none of the reasons offered up in this discussion make sense to me. Maybe they make sense to you. But I am skeptical.

Ben,
I'm not sure I fully understand why Jesus is called the son of God. I imagine it has something to do with the first century idea that the firstborn son had equal authority as his father and would inherit all of the land. It may also be a way to subvert the power structure of the day. It is well known that at the time of Jesus birth that ceasar was called the 'son of god'. Just a couple of ideas. Jesus never called himself the son of God, rather he referred to himself as the son if man. Anyway, Christians have always held to the idea that Jesus was God incarnate. Emmanuel means God with us.
I am not a scholar or even educated beyond high school, but I was raised in a Christian family, atended a great church and am very familiar with the bible stories.
You acknowledge that you are ignorant of alot of Christian theology, but I think your thoughts and questions are very reasonable and deserve a good answer. I share in your scepticism of penal substitution because of what I read in scripture. I'll spare you the citations.
I respect both Alisa and Dan, and I hope they consider me a brother, but neither of them have answered our questions to my satisfaction.
Here is a shot at what I think:
Imagine you are a Jewish person in WWII. You and a friend are hiding from people who are filled with evil and hatred for you and your friend. They want to put you into the camps and you both know exactly what will happen. You are captured and your friend has a chance to escape, but rather than run he turns himself in. He would rather suffer and die along side you.
This is the kind of love God has for us, he enters into our world and suffers along side us. Of course there is more to it, but I'm trying to be brief.
And with brevity in mind, although I have much more to say I'll leave it at that for now. Peace.

Hey Eric, I do accept you as my brother in Christ, but I would be being disingenuous if I said that your doctrine of the atonement as articulated in that last paragraph does not make me nervous. You are a very humble person and so I want to be extremely sensitive to that and extremely respectful, but it is my honest assessment that what you articulated is not orthodox. That doesn't mean I think you are not saved, it only means that I believe the Spirit is working to bring you into a fuller understanding of His word.

I am sorry that you feel we have not fully answered all of your objections, it is very hard to do in a blog. Also, because this isn't my website and because I can tend to be longwinded and overly zealous I don't want to say too much. I think the last two thirds of what I said to Ben in my first response to him would have been helpful to you, but as I said to him it was cut off, probably because it is way too long, which is completely understandable.

If you would like me to more substantially answer any and all objections and/or questions please contact me at my website which is attached to all of my comments and I will be happy to do so. I think Alisa has done a marvelous job of hitting the main points as can be done in short blog articles, but it is not reasonable to say that she has not adequately answered all of your concerns because there is not space to do so in this sort of venue.

With all due respect Ben, I don't buy it. I am not at all trying to attack you as a person. You might be an awesome person outside of this blog and I would have no problem being your friend or having a beer with you. I am not in any way saying that I'm better than you, we all have our sins and I have plenty. And as a Christian I would absolutely want you to point out to me where I was acting in an unethical manner. I'm not attacking you as an atheist either. My brother is an atheist and I have the utmost respect for him. He is extremely knowledgeable and thinks through his arguments very carefully, but in the end I find them terribly unconvincing. He was in Special Forces for years and fought his butt off and is a war hero. So I know firsthand that atheists can be great people.

Having said all of that, you run a counter-apologetics website and you came on this website and were extremely condescending and rude (saying "whatever that means" on two occasions). You must be held to a higher standard than a random Joe atheist coming on this website humbly asking questions. If you want to debate, that's fine, but you must educate yourself first. And if you want to come on here as someone who represents a counter-apologetics website and debate then you better believe someone like myself is going to hold you to the highest standards of scholarship.

If you say, my specialty is simply in defeating theism in general and not Christianity in particular, again fine, but then show more humility and don't erect straw man after straw man after straw man.

No one is saying that you need to be a scholar of Christianity in order to debate it. It would be most unreasonable to expect you to understand the intricacies of why Aquinas rejected Anselm's arguments for the Ontological Argument or the Franciscans arguments for the Immaculate Conception. But the idea that you can come on a conservative evangelical website and have little to no idea what that faith teaches and expect to erect endless straw men without being vigorously challenged is absurd. And you clearly do not even understand the basic tenets of our faith when you say that God did not need the atonement. It is a cardinal article of our faith that God did need the atonement and I more than demonstrated this in my comment. Unfortunately, the last two thirds were cut off (yes it was that long, but you raised so many straw men it took time to point them all out). Hence, if you would like me to address any of the points that were cut off you can contact me at my website which is linked to all of my comments and I would be happy to do so.

Also, if you ever want to formally debate the fundamental flaws of atheism, I am game. Just let me know.

Dan,

Sorry if you think I was being rude. I guess maybe blunt disagreement can come off that way in this faceless format, but that's not what I intended.

Anyway, no, I'm not interested in debating at all. I used to be—but that was years ago, a last remnant of my religious upbringing, I suspect.

But thank you for the response.

I wish you the best Ben, but I don’t have too much more to say to you here. I will be writing an article about our exchange on my blog next week if you or anyone else is interested. The blog is on my website which is linked to all my comments. It will post on Mon.

Dan,
I can't get to your blog from your website.
I would like to read it when you post it.

Um, that's really weird Eric. When you first go to my website there are a number of options at the top and one of them is blog. Is it just not letting you open it when you click on blog or something? If so, I have your email now and so I can just send you the direct link to the article once it posts if you are still having trouble. Just let me know. Thanks!

If you think about it, the crucifixion was actually far worse that any child abuse. Not only did Jesus suffer lengthy and excruciating torture (along with fatigue, thirst, hunger, cold, and humiliation), but He suffered in two other significant ways as well.

First, He took into His sinless soul the anger and hatred and torment of all of history's child abusers and mass murderers and sex traffickers and more–along with the anguish of their victims. Second, and most profoundly, He experienced the most unfathomable rejection and abandonment possible–actual separation from the Father to whom He had been eternally united.

Until we face the unparalleled enormity of His suffering, feeble though our comprehension must be–we will not understand the meaning of the cross. But the reality is that 2,000 years ago in an ordinary place, at the hands of ordinary men, the God of eternity chose this way to demonstrate His love, by both administering and receiving the consequences of our rebellion and sin.

As His followers prayed in Acts 4:24, 27-29: "Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them…truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place."

The "at-one-ment" part of this article is flawed. According to Strongs, the Hebrew word means to cover over, pacify and make propitiation. You can't break down an english word and apply it to a Hebrew word literally thousands of years old. Bad hermeneutics.