Chapter 20

The Love of the Trinity in the Atonement — Against "Cosmic Child Abuse"

Introduction: The Most Important Question About the Cross

We have now spent several chapters building the biblical and theological case for penal substitutionary atonement. We have looked at the Old Testament foundations, the New Testament evidence, and the historical development of the doctrine across nearly two thousand years. In Chapter 19, we pulled all of that together into a clear statement of what PSA actually teaches: that Jesus Christ, as our substitute, bore the judicial consequences of human sin so that we could be forgiven and made right with God.

But there is a question that hangs over all of this — a question that many thoughtful readers have probably been asking from the beginning. It is, in my view, the single most important question about penal substitutionary atonement, and it is the question that this chapter exists to answer.

The question is this: What kind of Father sends His Son to die?

That question cuts to the very heart of the matter. If penal substitution is true — if Jesus really did bear the penalty for our sins — then how do we understand the relationship between God the Father and God the Son at the cross? Was the Father angry at the Son? Did the Father pour out His wrath on Jesus? Was the cross a case of a powerful Father punishing a helpless Son? And if so, how is that any different from abuse?

These are not trivial questions. In recent decades, a number of prominent voices have raised exactly this kind of objection. British pastor Steve Chalke, in his 2003 book The Lost Message of Jesus (co-authored with Alan Mann), famously described penal substitutionary atonement as "a form of cosmic child abuse — a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed."¹ Feminist theologians Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, in their powerful book Proverbs of Ashes, argued that the doctrine of the cross has been used to justify the suffering of innocent people — especially women and children — by presenting an abused Son as the model of obedient love.² These charges have become enormously influential. Even many Christians who believe in the atonement feel uneasy with certain ways the cross has been described.

I want to say something clearly at the start of this chapter. I believe these critics are responding to something real. Some popular presentations of penal substitution have described the cross in ways that sound abusive. Some preachers have depicted the Father as an enraged deity venting His fury on Jesus. Some hymns and illustrations have set the Father and the Son against each other, as though they were opponents rather than co-equal Persons of the one God who acts together in unified love. John Stott rightly observed that "such crude interpretations of the cross still emerge in some of our evangelical illustrations, as when we describe Christ as coming to rescue us from the judgment of God, or when we portray him as the whipping-boy who is punished instead of the real culprit."³

But here is my central argument in this chapter: the solution to bad formulations of penal substitution is not to abandon penal substitution. The solution is to get it right. And when we get it right — when we understand the cross within the framework of Trinitarian love — what we find is not cosmic child abuse but something profoundly beautiful. We find the Triune God acting in unified, self-giving love to rescue a fallen world. We find the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together bearing the cost of our salvation. We find not a divided God, but a God whose love is so deep, so fierce, and so costly that He enters into the darkest consequences of human sin in order to bring us home.

I. Stott's "Self-Substitution of God": The Key Insight

No one has stated this more powerfully than John Stott in his classic work The Cross of Christ. In what I consider to be one of the most important chapters ever written on the atonement — Chapter 6, "The Self-Substitution of God" — Stott makes an argument that changes everything. He insists that the substitute at the cross is not a third party. The substitute is God Himself.

This is the key that unlocks the whole issue. Many of the objections to penal substitution — including the "cosmic child abuse" charge — arise from a fundamental mistake about who the substitute is. If we imagine that the substitute is an innocent third party — a human being named Jesus who is separate from God — then of course the cross looks unjust. Of course it looks like abuse. A powerful God punishing an innocent man would be morally monstrous. But that is not what the New Testament teaches. The New Testament teaches that the one who died on the cross was not merely a man. He was God the Son — the second Person of the Trinity, co-equal and co-eternal with the Father. And He went willingly.

Stott put it with unforgettable clarity. He argued that we must reject every picture of the cross that "denigrates the Father" by making Him either reluctant to forgive (so that Christ has to persuade Him) or eager to punish (so that Christ becomes His victim). Instead, Stott insisted, "the righteous, loving Father humbled himself to become in and through his only Son flesh, sin and a curse for us, in order to redeem us without compromising his own character."⁴

Listen to how Stott summarized it — and pay close attention, because I think this is one of the most important sentences ever written about the atonement:

The concept of substitution may be said, then, to lie at the heart of both sin and salvation. For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man. Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be. Man claims prerogatives that belong to God alone; God accepts penalties that belong to man alone.⁵

Do you see what Stott is doing here? He is not abandoning penal substitution. He is deepening it. The penalties are real. The substitution is real. But the substitute is not an unwilling victim — the substitute is God Himself. And this changes everything.

Stott went even further. He argued that the cross must be understood as "divine self-satisfaction through divine self-substitution." He wrote: "The biblical gospel of atonement is of God satisfying himself by substituting himself for us."⁶ This means the cross is not the story of an angry God finding someone else to punish. It is the story of a loving God who takes upon Himself the consequences that we deserved. It is self-substitution. It is self-sacrifice. And that is the very opposite of abuse.

The implications of this are enormous. Once we see that the substitute is God Himself — not a separate, helpless victim — every caricature of PSA collapses. As Stott noted, "the objections to a substitutionary atonement evaporate. There is nothing even remotely immoral here, since the substitute for the law-breakers is none other than the divine Lawmaker himself."⁷ The one who made the law is the one who fulfills the law's demands. The Judge takes the place of the judged. That is not injustice. It is the most radical act of love the universe has ever seen.

II. The Trinitarian Nature of the Atonement: Father, Son, and Spirit Acting Together

To understand why the cross is an act of love and not abuse, we need to think carefully about the Trinity. And I realize that the Trinity is one of the hardest doctrines in all of Christianity. But we do not need to understand every detail of this great mystery. We just need to grasp one crucial point: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one God, and they always act together with one unified will.

This is not some abstract theological technicality. It is the very thing that makes the cross good news instead of bad news. If the Father and the Son had separate, competing wills — if the Father wanted to punish and the Son wanted to save, and the cross was simply the Father overpowering the Son — then the cross would be a tragedy. It would be a story of conflict within God. But the New Testament gives us a completely different picture. It shows us all three Persons of the Trinity working together, united in love, to bring about our salvation.

The Father Sends the Son in Love

Let's start with the Father. What was the Father's motive in sending the Son to the cross? Was it anger? Rage? A desire for revenge? Not according to the New Testament. According to the New Testament, the Father's motive was love.

Consider John 3:16, perhaps the most famous verse in all of Scripture: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life" (ESV). Notice: it was love that moved the Father to give the Son. Not wrath. Not anger. Love.

Consider Romans 8:32: "He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?" (ESV). Paul uses the word "graciously" — this giving of the Son was an act of grace, not an act of vengeance. And notice the deliberate echo of Genesis 22, where Abraham was willing to offer up Isaac. God's giving of His Son is the ultimate expression of costly love.

Consider 1 John 4:10: "In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (ESV). This verse is remarkable because it directly connects the concepts of love and propitiation — the very concept that critics say is incompatible with love. John says the exact opposite. God's sending of the Son as the propitiation (the one who satisfies the demands of divine justice) is itself the supreme act of love. The initiative comes from God. We did not seek Him out. We did not appease Him. He loved us first, and He sent His Son.

David Allen has captured this trinitarian dimension well, drawing on the insights of Adam Johnson. Allen writes that "Scripture presents atonement and salvation as a trinitarian event." In Ephesians 1:3–14, the Father is the author of salvation, Christ provides the atoning work, and the Holy Spirit applies and preserves it. "In atonement, the Father gave the Son; but the Son also gave Himself. The Father sent the Son; but the Son Himself came. The Father did not require the Son to take up a cross that He was unwilling to bear."⁸

Adam Johnson himself captures the trinitarian shape of the atonement when he writes that the saving work of God involves a threefold willing: the Father wills the sacrifice, the Son wills to be sacrificed, and the Spirit wills to accompany and enable it. As Allen comments on Johnson's point, "any time we speak of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as though they were opposed, we do so at the expense of the doctrine of the Trinity and therefore at the expense of the Gospel."³¹ The trinitarian shape of the atonement means that we can never isolate what happens at the cross from the eternal loving fellowship of the Father, Son, and Spirit.

This is worth pausing over, because it cuts the ground out from under so many distortions of PSA. If the atonement is fundamentally trinitarian — if it flows from the eternal love of the Father, Son, and Spirit — then no account of the cross that introduces conflict within the Godhead can be correct. The love between the Father and the Son did not begin at Christmas and end at Good Friday. It is eternal love — the love that constitutes the very life of God. And it is this love, not wrath, that is the deepest motivation behind the cross.

D. A. Carson has argued persuasively that we must hold together multiple dimensions of God's love. There is God's intra-trinitarian love — the eternal love shared between Father, Son, and Spirit. There is God's providential love for creation. There is God's yearning love for the lost. And there is God's particular love for His people. The cross is the place where all of these dimensions of divine love converge. The Father's eternal love for the Son does not pause at the cross — it is expressed through the cross. And the Father's love for a fallen world is what moves Him to send the Son in the first place.³⁴

The Son Goes Willingly in Love

Now consider the Son. This is where the "child abuse" charge falls apart most completely. In child abuse, the victim is unwilling. The victim is helpless. The victim does not consent and cannot consent. But Jesus is none of these things. He is a co-equal, co-eternal Person of the Trinity. He is not a helpless child. He is the eternal Son of God, possessing the same divine nature, the same divine power, and the same divine will as the Father.

And He went to the cross willingly.

Jesus Himself said this in the clearest possible terms: "I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father" (John 10:17–18, ESV). Notice every element of this verse. "No one takes it from me" — He was not overpowered. "I lay it down of my own accord" — it was His free choice. "I have authority" — He acted from a position of power, not weakness. "This charge I have received from my Father" — the Father's commission and the Son's willing acceptance work together in perfect harmony.

The apostle Paul captures the same reality from the Son's perspective in Galatians 2:20: "The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (ESV). The Son was not dragged to the cross. He "gave himself." And His motive was love — He "loved me." The cross was not the Father's violence imposed on the Son. It was the Son's love expressed through self-sacrifice.

The book of Hebrews makes the same point in even more vivid language. When Christ enters the world, the author of Hebrews tells us, He says to the Father: "Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, 'Behold, I have come to do your will, O God'" (Hebrews 10:5–7, ESV, quoting Psalm 40). The Son's offering is voluntary. He comes to do the Father's will — not because He is forced, but because the Father's will is His own.

The Spirit Enables the Offering

There is one more Person of the Trinity involved in the cross, and He is too often overlooked. Hebrews 9:14 tells us that Christ "through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God" (ESV). This extraordinary verse reveals that the Holy Spirit was active in enabling Christ's self-offering at the cross. The Spirit is not a bystander. He is a participant. All three Persons of the Trinity are at work in the atonement — the Father giving, the Son offering, and the Spirit empowering.

This is what the church has always confessed. As Allen emphasizes, "In perfect trinitarian harmony, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit work together to atone for human sin and bring about salvation."⁹ There is one divine will at work at Calvary, not two competing wills. There is one purpose — the redemption of the world through self-giving love.

III. What Stott Got Right: "We Must Not Speak of God Punishing Jesus"

At this point, I want to make a very careful and important distinction. There is a way of speaking about the cross that Stott explicitly rejected — and I believe he was absolutely right to reject it. We must pay close attention to his words.

Stott wrote: "We must not, then, speak of God punishing Jesus or of Jesus persuading God, for to do so is to set them over against each other as if they acted independently of each other or were even in conflict with each other."¹⁰

This is a crucial statement. Stott — one of the greatest evangelical defenders of penal substitutionary atonement in the twentieth century — is saying that we should not say "God punished Jesus." Why not? Because that language, taken at face value, makes it sound as though the Father and the Son are separate parties with opposing interests — the Father as the one who punishes and the Son as the one who is punished. That framing is exactly the distortion that gives rise to the "cosmic child abuse" charge.

But wait — didn't the penalty really fall on Jesus? Yes, it did. The penalty of human sin was genuinely borne by Christ on the cross. That is the whole point of penal substitution. But the key is who bore it and how. It was not the Father punishing an unwilling victim. It was the Triune God — Father, Son, and Spirit — together bearing the cost of human sin. The Father did not inflict the penalty on the Son as though the Son were a separate, passive object. The Son voluntarily accepted the judicial consequences of sin. And the Father — far from sadistically enjoying the Son's suffering — gave up His own Son in love, at unspeakable cost to Himself.

Stott emphasized this point repeatedly. He pointed out that whenever the New Testament says that the Father "gave the Son," the Son "gave himself." When the Father "sent" the Son, the Son "came" willingly. "The Father did not lay on the Son an ordeal he was reluctant to bear, nor did the Son extract from the Father a salvation he was reluctant to bestow. There is no suspicion anywhere in the New Testament of discord between the Father and the Son.... On the contrary, their wills coincided in the perfect self-sacrifice of love."¹¹

I believe this is exactly right. The penalty of sin was real. The substitution was real. But the whole transaction — if we may call it that — was an expression of unified divine love, not a conflict between divine Persons.

IV. Against the "Cosmic Child Abuse" Objection: A Detailed Response

Now that we have established the Trinitarian framework, we are in a position to respond directly to the "cosmic child abuse" charge. Let us take the critics seriously. Let us understand what they are actually saying. And then let us show why, with all due respect, they are wrong.

The Charge Stated Fairly

Steve Chalke and Alan Mann framed the objection this way in The Lost Message of Jesus: How, they asked, have we come to believe that the God of love suddenly decides to vent His anger on His own Son? They argued that the cross, as understood through penal substitution, depicts a vengeful Father punishing His Son for something He did not do. Chalke called this "cosmic child abuse."¹²

Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker raised the concern from a different angle in Proverbs of Ashes. They argued that a theology in which God requires the suffering of His innocent Son can be — and has been — used to justify the suffering of innocent people. If God the Father demands the suffering of His Son, then perhaps suffering is noble. Perhaps victims should endure their suffering quietly, like Jesus. Brock and Parker documented real cases of women who were told to stay in abusive situations because "Christ suffered for you."¹³

J. Denny Weaver, in The Nonviolent Atonement, pushed the argument further. He contended that penal substitution makes God complicit in violence — that any theology in which God requires or orchestrates the death of Jesus makes God the author of violence, which is inconsistent with the nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels.¹⁴

I want to take a moment to acknowledge that these are not frivolous objections. They arise from genuine pastoral and moral concern. Brock and Parker's documentation of abuse survivors who were told to "suffer like Jesus" is genuinely heartbreaking. Any Christian — and especially any defender of penal substitution — should feel the weight of that concern. If our theology is being used to justify abuse, something has gone terribly wrong.

But the question is: Has the doctrine itself gone wrong, or has the misuse of the doctrine gone wrong? I believe it is the latter. And here is why.

Response 1: The Son Is Not a Helpless Victim

The "child abuse" analogy depends on casting Jesus in the role of a helpless child — someone who cannot consent, who is overpowered by a more powerful party, who suffers against his will for the gratification of his abuser. But every one of these elements is absent from the biblical portrayal of Christ's death.

Jesus is not a helpless child. He is the eternal Son of God — co-equal, co-eternal, and of one substance with the Father. He is not a junior deity or a lesser being. He shares fully in the divine nature. He possesses all authority in heaven and on earth (Matthew 28:18). He is the one through whom all things were created (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16). He is, as the Nicene Creed confesses, "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God."

As Jeffery, Ovey, and Sach argued in Pierced for Our Transgressions, the first critical difference between penal substitution and child abuse is that Jesus willingly went to His death with full knowledge of what was involved. When Peter tried to discourage Him, Jesus rebuked him (Mark 8:33). He explicitly declared that no one was forcing Him: "I lay down my life — only to take it up again. No-one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord" (John 10:17–18). Child abuse, by contrast, involves inflicting pain on an unwilling victim who is unable to understand what is happening.¹⁵

The second critical difference, as Jeffery, Ovey, and Sach further noted, is the purpose. Jesus died to bring glory to Himself and to save His people. Child abuse is carried out solely for the gratification of the abuser. Whatever else may be true about the violence of Jesus' death, it was not an instance of abuse. "Child abuse is carried out against the will of the victim for the sole gratification of the abuser; Jesus willingly went to his death to save his people and glorify his name."¹⁶

Response 2: The Father Does Not "Punish" in the Way Critics Imagine

When we say that Christ "bore the penalty" for our sins, we do not mean that the Father flew into a rage and vented His anger on the Son. That is the caricature. The reality is quite different.

What happened at the cross is that the Son voluntarily stepped into the place of sinful humanity and accepted the judicial consequences of human sin. Those consequences — death, separation, the weight of a broken world's rebellion — fell upon Him. He took them upon Himself. He absorbed them. The Father did not "pour out wrath" on the Son in the sense of directing personal anger at Him. Rather, the judicial consequences that sin brings — consequences that flow from the nature of God's just and holy order — were borne by Christ as our substitute.

Think of it this way. If a parent's child breaks a priceless vase, and the parent, rather than punishing the child, pays for the vase himself — absorbing the cost personally — we do not say the parent is punishing himself. We say he is bearing the consequences on behalf of the child. Something similar, though infinitely greater, happened at the cross. The consequences of sin were real. But God bore them Himself, in the Person of His Son, rather than leaving us to bear them.

The Eastern Orthodox scholar Fr. Joshua Schooping has made this point with remarkable clarity. Writing from within the Orthodox tradition — a tradition that is often assumed to reject PSA entirely — Schooping argues that the misrepresentation of PSA as requiring a sadistic God has caused many to reject an essential aspect of the atonement. He writes that the misunderstanding often arises from confusing the instrumentality of the cross (the suffering itself) with the telos (the purpose or goal). God's "pleasure" in the bruising of Isaiah 53:10 is not pleasure in the act of suffering for its own sake, but pleasure in the result — the justification of many sinners. As Schooping explains, "Clearly God is not pleased with or willing the act of bruising for its own sake, and so the pleasure cannot be seen as being in the mere act, but in its result. Sadism is thus denied and rejected as having any bearing on PSA."¹⁷

Hebrews 12:2 captures this same truth from the Son's perspective: "who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God" (ESV). Jesus endured the cross for the joy set before Him. The suffering was real and terrible. But it was embraced willingly for a purpose — the salvation of the world. No one who endures suffering for a great and worthy purpose is a victim of abuse. They are a hero.

Response 3: The Motivation Is Love, Not Anger

Perhaps the most fundamental problem with the "cosmic child abuse" charge is that it gets the motive completely wrong. In abuse, the motive is the abuser's own gratification — rage, power, control. At the cross, the motive is love.

"God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8, ESV). "In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him" (1 John 4:9, ESV). "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13, ESV).

The New Testament is relentless on this point. The cross is the supreme demonstration of God's love. It is not the eruption of God's anger. God was angry — at sin. His settled, just, holy opposition to evil is real (as we discussed in Chapter 3). But that anger was directed at sin, not at the Son. The Son stepped voluntarily into the path of those consequences so that sinners could be set free. That is not abuse. That is rescue.

I. Howard Marshall put the matter perfectly: "There is an indissoluble unity between Father, Son, and Spirit in the work of redemption. The recognition that it is God the Son, that is to say quite simply God, who suffers and dies on the cross, settles the question finally. This is God himself bearing the consequences of sin, not the abuse of some cosmic child."¹⁸

Response 4: Self-Sacrifice Is Not Abuse

There is one more thing that needs to be said. The "cosmic child abuse" charge fundamentally confuses self-sacrifice with victimization. These are not the same thing.

When a firefighter runs into a burning building to save a child, knowing that she may die, we do not call her a victim of abuse. We call her a hero. When a soldier throws himself on a grenade to save his friends, we do not say he was victimized. We say he made the ultimate sacrifice. When a parent gives a kidney to save their child's life, accepting the pain and risk of surgery, we do not accuse the doctors of abuse. We recognize that love sometimes costs something.

The cross is the supreme instance of costly love. God the Son, knowing full well what it would cost, chose to bear the consequences of human sin so that we could be forgiven. The Father, knowing full well the unspeakable cost, chose to give His Son. Neither was forced. Both acted in love. Both acted together. To call this "abuse" is to strip the word "love" of all meaning.

Chalke's charge is emotionally powerful, but it depends on ignoring the willingness of the Son, the love of the Father, and the unified purpose of the Trinity. As Jeffery, Ovey, and Sach concluded, "the label is misleading, disturbing — even blasphemous — and should be abandoned."¹⁹

V. The Father's Love for the Son at the Cross

I want to say something now that I feel very strongly about, and that I believe is essential to a healthy theology of the atonement. It is this: God the Father loved Jesus throughout the entire crucifixion. He was never enraged at His Son. Not for one moment.

Some popular presentations of PSA give the impression that the Father's love for the Son was somehow interrupted or suspended during the crucifixion — that for those terrible hours on the cross, the Father turned His face away in wrath and treated the Son as an object of anger. I believe this is deeply wrong, and I believe the Bible teaches otherwise.

Jesus Himself, on the very night before His death, prayed to the Father in John 17: "Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you.... I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed" (John 17:1, 4–5, ESV). Notice the intimacy. Notice the mutual love. Notice that Jesus describes the cross not as the moment when the Father's love will be withdrawn, but as the moment when the Father's purpose will be accomplished. The crucifixion is the Father's "hour" — the hour of glory, not the hour of abandonment.

In John's Gospel, the Father and Son's relationship is consistently described in terms of love, even — and especially — in connection with the cross. "Therefore my Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again" (John 10:17, ESV). The Father loves the Son because of the cross, not in spite of it. The cross is the very context in which the Father's love for the Son is most fully expressed.

As Jeffery, Ovey, and Sach observed, Jesus Himself "understands the cross as his Father's will for him, but does not perceive any conflict between this task and his Father's love for him. He knows that his Father's purposes are good."²⁰ In John 5:20, Jesus declares that the Father loves Him. In John 12:27–28, though "troubled" by what is coming, He prays not to escape but for God's name to be glorified. The cross is the path to glory, and Jesus walks it in the confident knowledge of His Father's love.

What about the cry of dereliction — Jesus' agonized words from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34, ESV)? This is the passage most commonly cited to suggest that the Father abandoned the Son — that the Trinity was "torn apart" at the cross.

I discussed the cry of dereliction in detail in Chapter 11, so I will not reproduce that full exegesis here. But the key point deserves repeating: Jesus is quoting Psalm 22:1, which begins in agony but ends in confident praise and vindication (Psalm 22:22–31). As Allen emphasizes, drawing on Thomas McCall's careful analysis, "the Trinity was in no way 'fractured,' 'broken,' or 'ruptured' when Christ died on the cross." McCall points out that Psalm 22:24 specifically says the Father "did not hide his face" from the sufferer — the very opposite of what the "abandonment" reading suggests. The cry of dereliction expresses the real agony of bearing the weight of human sin, but it does not describe an ontological rupture within the Godhead.²¹

Herman Bavinck expressed this beautifully: "Also on the cross Jesus remained the beloved Son, the Son of his Father's good pleasure."²² The Father never stopped loving the Son. The cross was not the interruption of love. It was the supreme expression of love — a love so deep that the Father and the Son together bore the cost of a world's salvation.

VI. Engaging with Hess: Shared Concerns, Different Conclusions

At this point, I want to engage directly with William Hess, whose book Crushing the Great Serpent: Did God Punish Jesus? raises many of the same concerns I have been addressing. Hess writes from an Eastern-influenced, Christus Victor perspective, and he ultimately rejects penal substitutionary atonement. But I find that I share many of his concerns about how PSA has been presented — even though I reach a very different conclusion about whether the penal element should be retained.

Hess recounts his own journey away from PSA. As a young Baptist pastor, he preached that God "poured out His wrath on His Son" and that "the Trinity was torn apart" at the cross.²³ Over time, he came to find these formulations deeply problematic, and I understand why. The idea that the Trinity was "torn apart" is theologically problematic. Orthodox Trinitarian theology does not allow for a rupture in the divine nature. The Father, Son, and Spirit are one God, united in one essence, and nothing — not even the cross — can divide the Godhead.

Where Hess and I part ways is in the conclusion we draw. Hess concludes that if the "Father pouring wrath on the Son" formulation is wrong, then penal substitution itself must be wrong. I conclude something different: the formulation is wrong, but penal substitution itself can be — and should be — affirmed within a healthier Trinitarian framework.

Hess raises the concern that PSA makes the cross about satisfying the Father's wrath rather than defeating the powers of evil. He prefers a Christus Victor model in which the cross is Christ's victory over sin, death, and the devil — a model I affirm as a genuine and important dimension of the atonement (as I will discuss in Chapter 21). But Hess frames these as competing alternatives: either the cross is about satisfying wrath, or it is about defeating evil. I believe the New Testament presents both as dimensions of a single, multi-faceted event (as I will argue in Chapter 24).

Where Hess raises the concern that PSA requires the Father to be "angry" at the Son, I believe the version of PSA I am defending in this chapter answers that concern fully. The Father was not angry at the Son. The Father loved the Son. The penalty borne by Christ was not the expression of the Father's personal rage toward Jesus. It was the judicial consequence of human sin — a consequence that the Son voluntarily accepted and the Father voluntarily permitted, both acting together in love. The penal dimension is preserved. The Trinitarian unity is preserved. And the love of God is not compromised — it is magnified.

VII. Schooping's Contribution: PSA Without Division in the Godhead

One of the most remarkable contributions to this discussion has come from an unexpected source: an Eastern Orthodox priest. Fr. Joshua Schooping, in An Existential Soteriology, has demonstrated that penal substitutionary atonement, rightly understood, does not require any division within the Godhead — and that the Church Fathers themselves, including major Eastern Fathers, affirmed the essential elements of PSA without ever threatening Trinitarian unity.

Schooping addresses the objection head-on: "Lastly, and perhaps the most egregious complaint, is that PSA entails a division in the Godhead." He calls the claim "absurd" and argues that if Christ can be tired, hungry, thirsty, and suffer in His human nature — things all Christians affirm — then He can also bear the judicial consequences of sin in His human nature without any division in the divine nature. As Schooping puts it: "If His fatigue, hunger, and thirst do not entail a division in the Godhead or in His Person, if His suffering does not entail a division in the Godhead or in His Person, and if His death does not entail a division in the Godhead or in His Person, then to say that Christ was divided from the Father by bearing the judgment of and for man is patently absurd."²⁴

This is a powerful argument. The same Christological framework that allows us to say "Christ died" (something that happened in His human nature, not His divine nature) also allows us to say "Christ bore the penalty of sin" without introducing any rupture in the Trinity. The suffering of the cross is real. It is experienced by Christ in His human nature — His human body and His human soul. But the Person who suffers is the eternal Son of God, who never ceases to be united with the Father and the Spirit in the one divine nature.

Schooping also makes an important point about the will of the Father. He shows that it was clearly the Father's will that Christ go to the cross — this is evident from the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed, "Not my will, but your will be done" (Luke 22:42). In John 18:11, Jesus asks Peter, "Shall I not drink the cup which the Father has given me?" It was the Father's will. And yet the Son willingly accepted it. "The Father wills that man be saved," Schooping writes, "and the Trinity, having a single will, in the dread mystery of the divine dispensation, ordained that Christ God fulfill His Father's eternal will to restore... the broken communion."²⁵

What Schooping helps us see — and this is truly significant — is that one can affirm penal substitution within a fully Orthodox Trinitarian framework. The cross is not the Father punishing the Son against His will. It is the Triune God, in the mystery of the Incarnation, entering into the consequences of human sin through the created human nature of Christ, in order to heal and restore what was broken. The penalty is real. The substitution is real. The love is real. And the Trinity remains undivided.

VIII. Theological Guardrails: When PSA Goes Wrong

I believe passionately in penal substitutionary atonement. But I also believe that some ways of expressing it are genuinely harmful and should be corrected. In this section, I want to establish some clear theological guardrails — boundaries that any faithful formulation of PSA must stay within.

Guardrail 1: No Division of Will Within the Trinity

Any formulation of PSA that depicts the Father and the Son as having different wills — the Father wanting to punish and the Son wanting to save, or the Father needing to be "appeased" by the Son's suffering — has departed from orthodox Trinitarian theology. The Father and the Son share one divine will. They act together, not in opposition. The cross was not a negotiation between an angry party and a loving party. It was the unified act of the one God who is both perfectly just and perfectly loving.

Guardrail 2: The Father Was Not Angry at the Son

We must be very careful about how we use the language of "wrath" in connection with the cross. God's wrath against sin is real — it is His settled, holy opposition to evil, as we discussed in Chapter 3. But God's wrath was directed at sin, not at the Son. The Father never looked at Jesus with anger. The Father never hated the Son. The Father never stopped loving the Son for even a moment. The penalty that Christ bore was the consequence of human sin, not the expression of the Father's personal rage toward Jesus.

This is where Schooping's discussion of divine impassibility is so helpful. Drawing on John of Damascus, Schooping reminds us that when Scripture speaks of God's "wrath" or "pleasure," these are anthropomorphic expressions — human language used to describe divine realities that transcend our full comprehension. God's "wrath" is not an emotional outburst. It is His justice in action. And God's "pleasure" in the bruising of Isaiah 53:10 is not sadistic enjoyment of suffering — it is satisfaction in the accomplishment of His redemptive purpose.²⁶

Guardrail 3: The Son Did Not Suffer Unwillingly

Any account of the atonement that presents Jesus as an unwilling victim — dragged to the cross against His will by an overbearing Father — is not a faithful representation of what the Bible teaches. Jesus went to the cross freely. He chose it. He embraced it. "For the joy that was set before him" He endured the cross (Hebrews 12:2). A theology that makes Jesus a passive victim fundamentally distorts the New Testament portrait of a Savior who actively, deliberately, and lovingly lays down His life for the world.

Guardrail 4: The Father Is Not a Separate "Angry Party" Needing Appeasement

One of the most common distortions of PSA is to depict the Father as an angry deity who needs to be calmed down by the sacrifice of the Son — as though the Father is one party and the Son is another, and the Son's job is to appease the Father's wrath on our behalf. This is exactly what happens in pagan religion: humans offer sacrifices to placate angry gods. But the biblical picture is the reverse. In pagan religion, the initiative comes from below — humans try to appease the gods. In Christianity, the initiative comes from above — God Himself provides the sacrifice.

"In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4:10, ESV). The Father is not a reluctant party who needs to be appeased. The Father is the initiator. The Father sends the Son. The Father gives the Son. The propitiation comes from God, not merely to God. This is the fundamental difference between Christian atonement and pagan sacrifice — a difference that Hess raises in his Chapter 14 ("Pagan Substitutionary Atonement") but that is fully answered once we understand the Trinitarian nature of the atonement.²⁷

IX. The Philosophical Dimension: Craig on Trinitarian Coherence

William Lane Craig, in Atonement and the Death of Christ, provides a helpful philosophical perspective on how penal substitution and Trinitarian unity fit together. Craig argues that understanding the Incarnation is the key. The second Person of the Trinity — the Logos — has voluntarily consented to take on a human nature. In that human nature, He is able to experience suffering, death, and the judicial consequences of sin — all without any disruption to the divine nature or the inner life of the Trinity.²⁸

This is essentially the same point Schooping makes from the patristic tradition. The Chalcedonian Definition (AD 451) teaches that Christ has two natures — divine and human — united in one Person, "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation." The sufferings of the cross belong to the human nature. The Person who suffers is divine. And the divine nature remains impassible (unable to suffer) even while the Person of the Son genuinely suffers in His human nature.

This Christological framework solves the problem that critics raise. If we think of the cross as the divine Father inflicting suffering on the divine Son — divine nature upon divine nature — then it sounds like a conflict within God. But that is not what happens. The Father permits (and wills) that the Son, in His human nature, bear the consequences of human sin. The Son, as a divine Person with a human nature, freely accepts those consequences. There is no conflict in the divine will. There is no rupture in the divine nature. There is a divine Person who, through His human nature, bears what we could not bear.

Craig also helpfully addresses the question of whether God can truly be said to "punish Himself." Some have objected that punishment requires two parties — a punisher and a person punished — and that self-punishment is incoherent. But Craig points out that the Incarnation provides exactly the distinction needed. The Father and the Son are distinct Persons (not the same Person — that would be the heresy of modalism), and the Son has a human nature in which He can genuinely experience what we experience. So the "two parties" are not two Gods, but two Persons of the one God, working together through the Incarnation to bear the cost of sin.²⁹

This is a deep mystery, to be sure. We are talking about the inner life of the Triune God — a reality that no human mind can fully grasp. But it is not incoherent. It is precisely what the church's Christological and Trinitarian dogmas were designed to protect: the unity of God, the distinction of Persons, the two natures of Christ, and the voluntary character of His saving work.

Allen adds an important philosophical dimension by discussing the concept of divine simplicity — the traditional theological teaching that God's attributes are not separable parts but are all expressions of His one, undivided nature. What this means for the atonement is profound: God is never "more loving than just" or "more just than loving." His love and His justice are not competing forces that need to be balanced against each other. They are both fully and simultaneously present in every divine act. As Allen notes, drawing on Adonis Vidu, "the history of atonement theories is really a debate about the nature of God, especially the relationship between the two attributes of justice and love." And divine simplicity ensures that there can be no conflict between them.³²

Thomas McCall makes the same point: divine simplicity makes a conflict between love and wrath impossible. If God's nature is simple — not composed of separable parts — then His justice is loving and His love is just. They are not two forces pulling in opposite directions. At the cross, God's justice is satisfied (the penalty of sin is borne) and God's love is expressed (the penalty is borne by God Himself) in one and the same act. The cross does not resolve a tension between two competing attributes. It reveals the unity of God's character in the most powerful way imaginable.³³

This philosophical framework helps us understand why the "cosmic child abuse" charge misses the mark so completely. The critics assume that justice and love are in tension — that for God to satisfy His justice, He must override His love, and vice versa. But if divine simplicity is true, then justice and love were never in tension to begin with. The cross is not where love defeats justice or where justice overrides love. It is where love and justice are perfectly expressed together — "Steadfast love and faithfulness meet; righteousness and peace kiss each other" (Psalm 85:10, ESV).

X. Responding to the Pastoral Concern: The Cross and Abuse

Before I close this chapter, I want to return to the pastoral concern raised by Brock, Parker, and others. We must not dismiss this concern quickly. If our theology of the cross has been used to justify abuse — to tell victims that they should "suffer like Jesus" — then we have a serious pastoral problem that demands a serious response.

But the response should not be to abandon penal substitution. The response should be to correct the misuse and to show that the cross, rightly understood, is actually the most powerful critique of abuse in all of human history.

Think about what the cross actually reveals. It reveals that the suffering of the innocent is not something God approves of — it is something God Himself enters into and redeems. Jesus' suffering is not a model for passive acceptance of abuse. Jesus' suffering is unique and unrepeatable. He is the sinless Son of God taking on the consequences of the world's sin. That is not something any human being is called to replicate.

In fact, the cross shows us that God identifies with the victim, not the abuser. In the crucifixion, Jesus is the innocent party — falsely accused, unjustly condemned, brutally executed. The perpetrators are the ones who stand condemned. The cross exposes the horror of violence done to the innocent. It does not celebrate it.

As Jeffery, Ovey, and Sach pointed out, the misuse of a doctrine does not invalidate the doctrine itself.³⁰ The fact that some people have twisted the theology of the cross to justify abuse is a terrible indictment of those people — not of the cross. We do not abandon the doctrine of grace because some have used it to justify moral laxity. We do not abandon the doctrine of God's sovereignty because some have used it to promote fatalism. And we should not abandon penal substitution because some have used it to excuse suffering.

The proper pastoral response is to say clearly: Christ's suffering was voluntary, unique, and redemptive. It is not a model for accepting abuse. Abuse is sin. Abusers will answer to God. And the God who suffered at the cross is the God who stands with every victim and against every abuser.

There is something else worth saying here. If we abandon penal substitution out of concern for abuse survivors, we actually deprive them of one of their greatest sources of comfort. Because penal substitution tells us that God takes sin seriously. It tells us that injustice does not go unanswered. It tells us that the consequences of wrongdoing are real and that God does not look the other way. For someone who has suffered at the hands of an abuser, the message that God is just — that He will not let evil go unpunished — is not a frightening message. It is the most comforting message in the world. A God who is only loving but not just offers no assurance that the wrongs done to victims will ever be addressed. A God who is both loving and just offers the assurance that He cares deeply about what was done to them, that He will make things right, and that the cross is the proof that He takes sin — including the sin of abuse — with the utmost seriousness.

Jeffery, Ovey, and Sach make a similar point in their response to the violence objection. They argue that PSA does not glorify suffering for its own sake. Instead, it acknowledges the terrible reality of sin and its consequences, and then shows us a God who enters into that reality to bring about redemption. The cross is realistic about the cost of sin — and in a world full of suffering, realism is far more pastorally helpful than sentimentality.³⁰

XI. The Cross as the Supreme Revelation of Love

We have spent much of this chapter answering objections — and rightly so, given the seriousness of the charges. But I do not want to end on a defensive note. I want to end by saying what the cross positively reveals about the love of God.

The cross, rightly understood, is not a story of anger. It is a story of love — the deepest, most costly, most radical love the universe has ever known.

It is the love of the Father, who gives His only Son — not reluctantly, but willingly, at unspeakable cost to Himself. Abraham was spared the sacrifice of Isaac. The Father was not spared the sacrifice of His Son. "He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all" — this is love beyond our ability to fully comprehend (Romans 8:32).

It is the love of the Son, who lays down His life freely. He is not a passive victim. He is the Good Shepherd who "lays down his life for the sheep" (John 10:11). He is the friend who shows the greatest possible love by dying for those He loves (John 15:13). He is the bridegroom who "loved the church and gave himself up for her" (Ephesians 5:25).

It is the love of the Spirit, who enables the offering and applies its benefits. Through the Spirit, Christ offered Himself without blemish to God (Hebrews 9:14). Through the Spirit, the love of God is poured into our hearts (Romans 5:5). The Spirit is the one who takes the objective accomplishment of the cross and makes it real in our experience.

And it is the love of the Triune God — not three separate acts of love, but one unified act of divine self-giving. The Father gives the Son. The Son gives Himself. The Spirit empowers the giving. And all of it flows from the eternal, overflowing, self-giving love that is the very life of the Trinity.

This is what Stott meant by "self-substitution." God does not find someone else to bear the cost. God bears the cost Himself. God does not stand at a distance while someone else suffers. God enters into the suffering. God does not demand payment from a third party. God pays the price in His own Person.

I find this breathtaking. I find it humbling beyond words. And I believe it is the very heart of the gospel.

Conclusion: Penal Substitution as the Deepest Act of Love

Let me draw the threads together. In this chapter, I have argued that penal substitutionary atonement, rightly understood, is not a story of anger, violence, or abuse. It is a story of love — Trinitarian love, self-giving love, costly love.

The "cosmic child abuse" charge, while emotionally powerful, fails on every count. The Son is not a helpless victim but a co-equal Person of the Trinity who acts voluntarily. The Father does not punish the Son in the sense of inflicting violence on an unwilling party. The motivation is love, not anger. And to call the self-sacrifice of the eternal Son "abuse" is to fundamentally misunderstand both the nature of divine love and the nature of the Trinity.

I have argued that the key insight belongs to John Stott: the cross is God's self-substitution. The substitute is not a third party. The substitute is God Himself, in the Person of His Son. This changes everything. It means the cross is not the story of a powerful God finding a victim to punish. It is the story of a loving God who takes the punishment upon Himself.

I have argued that all three Persons of the Trinity are active at the cross: the Father sending in love, the Son going willingly in love, and the Spirit enabling the offering. There is one unified divine will at work, not competing wills. And I have drawn on the remarkable work of Fr. Joshua Schooping to show that this Trinitarian understanding of PSA does not require any division within the Godhead and is fully compatible with the patristic and Orthodox theological tradition.

I have also established four theological guardrails that any faithful formulation of PSA must observe: no division of will in the Trinity, no wrath directed at the Son as Person, no unwilling suffering, and no depiction of the Father as a separate angry party needing appeasement. Any version of PSA that violates these boundaries has gone wrong and needs to be corrected.

But when PSA stays within these boundaries — when it is understood as the Triune God acting in unified, self-giving love to bear the judicial consequences of human sin — what emerges is not a horror story. What emerges is the most beautiful, the most costly, and the most hopeful story ever told. The story of a God who loves His broken world so much that He enters into its brokenness, bears its consequences, and opens the way to healing and life.

That is the cross at its deepest. That is penal substitution at its best. That is the love of the Trinity in the atonement.

Karl Barth captured this reality with characteristic power. In his treatment of the atonement in Church Dogmatics IV/1, Barth described the cross as "The Judge Judged in Our Place." The one who has the right to judge — God Himself — is the one who submits to judgment. The one who pronounces the verdict is the one who bears the verdict. Barth insisted that Christology is the key to understanding the cross: "In Jesus Christ we have to do with very God. The reconciliation of man with God takes place as God himself actively intervenes." And yet this very God is also very man, and it is as the God-man that He takes our place. "The passion of Jesus Christ is the judgment of God, in which the judge himself was the judged."³⁷ Barth's language is dramatic, even overwhelming. But it captures something essential: the cross is not God punishing someone else. It is God taking the judgment upon Himself.

P. T. Forsyth made a similar point with remarkable directness: "God dying for man. I am not afraid of that phrase; I cannot do without it." Because God's holiness is meaningless without judgment, and because God faces a world in rebellion against Him, "He must either inflict punishment or assume it. And he chose the latter course, as honouring the law while saving the guilty. He took his own judgment."³⁸ Notice the beauty of this: God's options were to inflict the punishment on us or to assume it Himself. And in love, He chose to assume it. That is what the cross is. That is what penal substitution teaches. And there is nothing ugly about it. It is the most beautiful thing in the universe.

Fleming Rutledge, in her monumental study The Crucifixion, affirms this same insight: "The judge has been judged in our place. The One who condemns sin is the One who bears its condemnation."⁴³ Rutledge is cautious about certain formulations of PSA, but she embraces its essential logic. The cross works precisely because it is God Himself who bears the cost. Any lesser substitute would be insufficient.

"The concept of substitution may be said, then, to lie at the heart of both sin and salvation." And at the heart of substitution lies not wrath, but love — the eternal, self-giving, costly love of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Stott was right to insist that the incarnation is indispensable to the atonement. "In particular," he wrote, "it is essential to affirm that the love, the holiness and the will of the Father are identical with the love, the holiness and the will of the Son. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself."³⁵ The identity of will between the Father and the Son is not a minor theological footnote. It is the very thing that makes the cross good news. If the Father and the Son had different wills — if the Father willed punishment while the Son willed mercy — then the cross would be a tragedy, a family torn apart. But because the Father and the Son share one will, one love, one purpose, the cross is the supreme expression of the undivided heart of God.

And this is where we can say something that the critics miss entirely. The cross is not the least loving thing God does. It is the most loving thing God does. It is the place where the depth of divine love is most fully revealed. "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13, ESV). Jesus said this about Himself — and about the Father who sent Him. The cross reveals the very heart of God. And that heart is not angry. It is not vindictive. It is not abusive. It is love — fierce, costly, self-giving, world-redeeming love.

I believe that when we stand before the cross and truly see what is happening there — the eternal Son of God, in perfect unity with the Father and the Spirit, freely bearing the consequences of a world's sin out of boundless love — the only response is worship. Not horror. Not outrage. Worship. Because this is not abuse. This is grace. This is God, in the words of Schooping, offering "the limitless love of the Son... in sacrifice upon the altar of the Cross so as to proclaim to heaven and earth the inviolable laws of eternal righteousness."³⁶ Justice and love, meeting perfectly at the cross. That is the gospel. And it is, I believe, the most wonderful news in all the world.

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