Chapter 35
Contemporary Objections — Violence, Feminism, and Liberation Theology

Introduction: The Cross Under Fire in the Modern World

We have come a long way in this book. We have examined the biblical foundations of penal substitutionary atonement. We have traced its roots through the Old Testament sacrificial system and into the New Testament's interpretation of Christ's death. We have walked through the patristic era and the Reformation and found that substitutionary and penal language runs deep in the Christian tradition. We have built a philosophical defense of the doctrine and responded to exegetical, theological, and Eastern Orthodox objections. But there is one more set of criticisms we need to address — and in some ways, these may be the most emotionally powerful of all.

In recent decades, a wave of objections to penal substitutionary atonement has come from scholars and activists who are concerned about violence, the oppression of women, and the marginalization of the poor. These are not abstract academic complaints. They emerge from real pastoral situations — from women who have been told to endure abuse because "Jesus suffered for you," from communities crushed by systemic injustice who wonder whether a doctrine focused on individual guilt has anything to say about structural evil, and from thoughtful people who simply cannot reconcile the image of a loving God with the idea that God required His Son to die a violent death.

I want to be upfront about something at the start of this chapter. I believe these concerns deserve to be taken seriously. They are not frivolous. Some of them point to real problems — not with penal substitutionary atonement itself, but with distorted versions of it that have done genuine harm. If the cross has been used to justify the abuse of the vulnerable, then we as Christians need to repent of that misuse, not merely dismiss the criticism.

But here is my thesis for this chapter: Contemporary objections to penal substitutionary atonement from feminist, liberationist, and nonviolent perspectives raise important pastoral and ethical concerns that must be taken seriously, but they ultimately fail to overturn the doctrine when it is rightly understood within a Trinitarian framework of divine love and self-sacrifice. The solution to the misuse of the cross is not to abandon the cross. The solution is to recover the true meaning of the cross.

We will examine four major categories of contemporary objection: the "cosmic child abuse" accusation, the feminist critique, the nonviolent atonement proposal, and the liberation theology concern. For each, I will present the objection as fairly and forcefully as I can, and then I will offer a response.

I. The "Cosmic Child Abuse" Objection Revisited

The Accusation and Its Cultural Power

We addressed the "cosmic child abuse" charge at length in Chapter 20, where we showed that the Trinitarian nature of the atonement — the unified, self-giving love of Father, Son, and Spirit at the cross — decisively refutes the caricature of an angry Father punishing an unwilling Son. But this objection keeps coming back, and in the #MeToo era it has gained fresh cultural power. So we need to revisit it here, focusing specifically on why the charge resonates so deeply in our cultural moment and what it tells us about the state of popular atonement teaching.

The phrase "cosmic child abuse" was popularized by British pastor and social activist Steve Chalke and his co-author Alan Mann in their 2003 book The Lost Message of Jesus. Chalke asked how Christians have come to believe that "at the cross this God of love suddenly decides to vent his anger and wrath on his own Son," and declared that "the cross isn't a form of cosmic child abuse — a vengeful Father, punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed."¹ The phrase was incendiary. It provoked enormous controversy, especially in the United Kingdom, where Chalke was a well-known evangelical leader.²

But Chalke was not the first to use this kind of language. Theologians Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker had raised similar concerns as early as 1989 in their influential essay "For God So Loved the World?" And Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker developed the argument at length in their 2001 book Proverbs of Ashes, where they argued that theologies of redemptive suffering have been used to keep abuse victims silent and compliant.³

Why does this charge resonate so powerfully? I think there are at least three reasons.

First, it resonates because some popular presentations of penal substitutionary atonement really have described the cross in ways that sound abusive. When preachers describe God the Father as "pouring out His white-hot fury" on Jesus, or depict the Father turning His face away from the Son in disgust, or talk about God "crushing" Jesus under the weight of His anger — these images, whatever their intent, can sound to modern ears remarkably like descriptions of an abusive relationship. An angry authority figure takes out his rage on someone who cannot fight back. That is not what penal substitution actually teaches, as we showed in Chapter 20. But we cannot pretend that this caricature has no basis in popular preaching.

Second, the charge resonates because our culture has become rightly more aware of patterns of abuse, particularly the abuse of children and the abuse of women. The #MeToo movement, revelations of abuse within churches and other institutions, and a growing awareness of the lasting damage caused by violence against the vulnerable — all of these have made modern audiences acutely sensitive to any narrative that appears to normalize or justify the suffering of the innocent. When people hear a doctrine that seems to say, "God required an innocent person to suffer a violent death, and this was a good thing," their alarm bells go off. And we should understand why.

Third, the charge resonates because of a genuine theological confusion that has sometimes crept into popular PSA teaching — a confusion about the relationship between the Father and the Son at the cross. When the atonement is presented as though the Father and the Son had different agendas at Calvary, as though the Father was angry and the Son was the reluctant target of that anger, then the doctrine has been distorted beyond recognition. As we argued extensively in Chapter 20, the Father did not pour out His wrath upon the Son. The Godhead acted in unified, self-giving love. The Son went willingly. The Father was present with Him in love even amid the agony. Any formulation that pits the Father against the Son must be rejected.

Responding to the Charge

The full Trinitarian response to this objection was given in Chapter 20, and I will not repeat it all here. But let me summarize the key points and add some additional observations that are especially relevant to this contemporary conversation.

First, and most fundamentally, penal substitution does not involve the punishment of an unwilling victim. Jesus went to the cross freely and deliberately. He told His disciples plainly what awaited Him in Jerusalem: "The Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death" (Mark 10:33, ESV). When Peter tried to dissuade Him, Jesus rebuked him sharply: "Get behind me, Satan!" (Mark 8:33, ESV). And Jesus stated explicitly 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, ESV). As Jeffery, Ovey, and Sach rightly observe, the difference between penal substitution and child abuse is that child abuse involves inflicting pain upon an unwilling victim, while Jesus went to His death with full knowledge and voluntary consent.⁴

Second, child abuse is carried out for the gratification of the abuser. The cross was carried out for the salvation of the world. The Father did not send the Son to the cross because He needed to vent His anger. He sent the Son because He loved the world (John 3:16). The cross was not an act of sadistic rage. It was an act of sacrificial love, initiated by God Himself. Paul makes this crystal clear: "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8, ESV). John puts it even more pointedly: "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 initiative comes from God. The motive is love. The beneficiary is us.

Third, the "cosmic child abuse" label is profoundly misleading because it fails to account for the Trinitarian nature of the atonement. The Father and the Son are not two separate individuals with competing interests. They are one God. As John Stott memorably argued, the cross is not a case of God punishing someone else — it is a case of God Himself bearing the cost of our sin. The great mystery of the atonement is that "the Judge himself was judged in our place."⁵ To call this "child abuse" is to fundamentally misunderstand who is doing what at the cross. It is not an angry deity punishing an innocent third party. It is the self-substitution of God.

Fourth, as Jeffery, Ovey, and Sach point out, the Bible itself affirms that it was God's will for Christ to suffer. Isaiah 53:10 says plainly, "It was the will of the LORD to crush him; he has put him to grief" (ESV). We may find this language startling, but we cannot reject it without rejecting the word of God. Moreover, any view of the atonement that upholds God's sovereignty must acknowledge that God was in control of Jesus' death. Acts 2:23 says Jesus was "delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God" (ESV), and Acts 4:27–28 says that Herod, Pontius Pilate, the Gentiles, and the people of Israel did "whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place" (ESV).⁶

Fifth — and this is a point I find especially important — the "cosmic child abuse" charge actually dishonors the very victims it claims to protect. To place the voluntary, Trinitarian, love-driven self-sacrifice of God in the same category as the exploitation of helpless children by selfish abusers is to trivialize the horror of actual child abuse. The two situations could not be more different. In child abuse, a powerful person exploits a powerless one for selfish gain. In the atonement, the all-powerful God gives Himself for the salvation of the powerless. To collapse these two realities into the same category requires a breathtaking failure of moral and theological discernment.

I should add one more thing. The fact that some popular presentations of PSA have sounded abusive is not a reason to abandon PSA. It is a reason to teach it better. When we present the cross as the unified action of the triune God — Father, Son, and Spirit working together in love — the "cosmic child abuse" charge simply loses its target. There is nothing to aim at. The caricature dissolves. What remains is the overwhelming reality of a God who loved us so much that He bore the consequences of our sin in His own being.

II. The Feminist Critique: Does PSA Glorify Suffering?

Hearing the Concern

The feminist critique of penal substitutionary atonement is, at its heart, a pastoral critique. It grows out of real experiences of pain. And I want to honor that before responding to it theologically.

The most influential statement of this critique came from Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker in their 1989 essay "For God So Loved the World?" Brown and Parker argued that the Christian theology of the cross — and penal substitution in particular — glorifies suffering, especially the suffering of the innocent. They contended that when Christians teach that Jesus' suffering was redemptive, they implicitly teach that all innocent suffering can be redemptive. And this, they argued, has devastating consequences for women and children who are victims of abuse. If suffering is redemptive, then victims are told to endure their abuse patiently, to "bear their cross," to forgive their abusers, and to believe that their suffering has meaning. Brown and Parker concluded that "Christianity is an abusive theology that glorifies suffering."⁷

Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker developed this argument in their deeply personal 2001 book Proverbs of Ashes. Drawing on their own experiences of violence and abuse, they argued that doctrines of substitutionary atonement have been used to teach women that self-sacrifice is the highest virtue, that bearing suffering without complaint is Christlike, and that the needs of others always come before their own safety. Parker recounted being told by a minister, after disclosing childhood sexual abuse, that she should forgive her abuser and remember that "God required the death of His own Son" — the implication being that if God could endure seeing His Son suffer, she should be able to endure her own suffering too.⁸

These are wrenching stories. And I want to say clearly: any use of the cross to tell a victim that she should remain in an abusive situation is an abomination. It is a betrayal of the gospel, not an application of it. Any pastor or counselor who uses the theology of the atonement to justify the abuse of the vulnerable should be rebuked in the strongest possible terms. The cross does not teach victims to accept their abuse. It teaches us that God stands with the victim against the abuser.

Responding to the Feminist Critique

Having taken the concern seriously, let me explain why I believe the feminist critique, while raising legitimate pastoral issues, ultimately fails as a theological argument against penal substitutionary atonement.

First, the misuse of a doctrine does not invalidate the doctrine itself. This is a basic principle of logic, and it applies universally. The doctrine of forgiveness has been misused to pressure victims into premature reconciliation with their abusers. The doctrine of marital submission has been misused to justify domestic violence. The doctrine of divine sovereignty has been misused to encourage fatalism and passivity in the face of injustice. In every case, the misuse is deplorable — but the solution is to correct the misuse, not to abandon the doctrine. If we rejected every theological truth that has ever been distorted or weaponized, we would have no theology left. As Jeffery, Ovey, and Sach observe, even the most basic Christian affirmation — "God is love" — can be and has been misused to justify moral permissiveness. That does not mean we should stop affirming it.⁹

Second, the cross is actually the most powerful critique of abuse — not its endorsement. Think about what the cross reveals. It reveals a God who identifies with the victim, not the abuser. Jesus was the innocent one, unjustly condemned, beaten, tortured, and killed by those who had power over Him. When God chose to enter our suffering, He entered it from the side of the victim. The cross does not glorify the suffering of the innocent; it exposes the horrifying evil of inflicting suffering on the innocent. It names that evil for what it is. And then it defeats it.

This is an essential point that Brock, Parker, Brown, and other feminist critics seem to miss. The cross is not a template that says, "All innocent suffering is good and should be endured passively." The cross is a unique, unrepeatable event in which God Himself bore the consequences of human sin. Christ's suffering is not a pattern for passive acceptance of abuse. It is the decisive act by which God breaks the power of evil, including the evil of violence against the innocent. The proper application of the cross to a victim of abuse is not, "You should suffer like Jesus suffered." The proper application is, "God sees your suffering. He stands with you. He condemns the one who hurts you. And He has acted decisively to defeat the evil that holds you captive."

Third, Christ's suffering was voluntary, unique, and unrepeatable. This distinction is absolutely critical. Jesus was not a passive victim who had no choice. He went to the cross freely, with full knowledge, as an act of sovereign love. He could have called twelve legions of angels (Matthew 26:53). He chose not to. His suffering was not imposed on Him against His will by someone more powerful. He laid down His life of His own accord (John 10:18).

This means that Jesus' experience on the cross is not analogous to the experience of an abused woman or child. An abuse victim is powerless, trapped, and exploited. Jesus was none of these things. He was the all-powerful Son of God who chose, out of love, to give Himself for us. To equate the two situations is to make a category error of the most serious kind. It dishonors both the uniqueness of Christ's sacrifice and the reality of the victim's suffering.

Moreover, Christ's atoning suffering is unrepeatable. The book of Hebrews makes this point repeatedly: Christ "offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins" (Hebrews 10:12, ESV). His suffering accomplished something that no other suffering can accomplish — the redemption of the world. Christians are not called to repeat Christ's atoning work. We are called to trust in it. When the New Testament calls us to "take up our cross" (Mark 8:34), it is calling us to self-denial and faithful discipleship — not to passive endurance of abuse.¹⁰

Fourth, penal substitution, rightly understood, provides the strongest possible moral foundation for opposing abuse. Why is abuse wrong? PSA gives us a profound answer: because every human being is so valuable that God Himself was willing to die for them. If the Son of God gave His life for every person, then every person has infinite dignity and worth. To abuse, exploit, or degrade any human being — especially one for whom Christ died — is an act of monstrous evil. It is an assault not just on the victim but on the God who loves the victim enough to die for them.

Stott makes this point beautifully when he argues that the cross is the supreme demonstration of both the justice and the love of God. God does not tolerate evil. He does not shrug at the suffering of the innocent. He takes sin so seriously that He was willing to bear its consequences Himself. A God like that does not endorse abuse. He condemns it with every fiber of His being.¹¹

Fifth, the feminist alternative often ends up with a weaker God, not a stronger one. Many feminist theologians, in their understandable desire to protect victims, end up rejecting any notion of divine wrath or divine judgment. But think about what this means for victims. If God is not angry at injustice, if God does not judge the oppressor, if God does not take action against evil — then victims are left without hope. A God who is merely sad about abuse but does nothing about it is no comfort at all. It is precisely because God takes evil seriously — seriously enough to judge it, seriously enough to bear its consequences Himself — that victims can have hope. The cross says that evil will not have the last word. The abuse will not go unanswered. Justice will be done. And it has been done, at Calvary.

David Allen captures this well when he argues that the atonement must be understood in terms of God's holiness as well as God's love. A God who is only loving but not holy and just has no capacity to deal with evil. It is the combination of perfect love and perfect justice that makes the cross both beautiful and powerful.¹²

III. The Nonviolent Atonement: J. Denny Weaver and the Rejection of Divine Violence

The Argument

J. Denny Weaver's book The Nonviolent Atonement (2001; revised 2011) represents one of the most thoroughgoing attempts to reconstruct atonement theology along pacifist lines. Weaver, a Mennonite theologian with deep commitments to nonviolence, argues that all satisfaction-based atonement theories — including penal substitution, Anselm's satisfaction model, and even some versions of Christus Victor — make God complicit in violence. In his view, any theology that says God required, intended, or orchestrated the death of Jesus is a theology that makes God a perpetrator of violence.¹³

Weaver's alternative is what he calls "narrative Christus Victor." In this model, Jesus' death is not something God planned or intended. Rather, Jesus was killed by the powers of evil — human political and religious authorities acting under the influence of cosmic forces of oppression. God's role was not to send Jesus to die but to raise Him from the dead, thereby defeating the powers that killed Him. The resurrection, not the cross, is the center of salvation. The cross reveals the violence of the world; the resurrection reveals the nonviolent power of God.¹⁴

Weaver contends that penal substitution is the most problematic of all atonement models because it most directly implicates God in violence. If God required the death of His Son as the penalty for sin, then God is the ultimate source of the violence of the cross. And if God uses violence to accomplish His purposes, then violence is legitimated — indeed, sanctified — at the highest possible level. Weaver argues that this has had devastating consequences throughout Christian history, providing theological justification for crusades, inquisitions, slavery, colonialism, and other forms of systemic violence.¹⁵

The appeal of Weaver's argument is obvious. Who would not prefer a nonviolent God? Who would not want to distance Christianity from the history of violence that has been committed in its name? Weaver is asking an important question: Does our theology of the cross contribute to violence in the world, or does it challenge it?

Responding to Weaver

Despite the attractiveness of Weaver's proposal, I believe it fails on several counts — exegetically, theologically, and even on its own terms.

First, Weaver's proposal requires us to reject the New Testament's own interpretation of Jesus' death. This is the most fundamental problem. The New Testament does not present Jesus' death as an accident, a tragedy, or the unintended result of evil human actions. It presents Jesus' death as planned, purposed, and orchestrated by God for the salvation of the world. Acts 2:23 says Jesus was "delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God" (ESV). Acts 4:27–28 says that those who conspired against Jesus "did what your hand and your plan had predestined to take place" (ESV). Isaiah 53:10 says, "It was the will of the LORD to crush him" (ESV). Jesus Himself said He came "to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45, ESV).

Weaver's narrative Christus Victor cannot account for these texts. If Jesus' death was merely the result of evil powers acting against God's will, then why does the New Testament repeatedly say that God planned and purposed it? Weaver must either reinterpret these texts in ways that strain their plain meaning or simply set them aside. Either way, his proposal comes at an enormous exegetical cost.¹⁶

Second, Weaver's separation of the cross from the resurrection is artificial. In the New Testament, the cross and the resurrection are inseparable. They are two moments of a single saving event. Paul does not say, "If Christ has not been raised, then your faith is in vain, but the cross doesn't really matter." He holds cross and resurrection together as one unified reality (1 Corinthians 15:3–4, 17). The earliest Christian creed — "Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures" — places the atoning significance squarely on the death, not merely on the resurrection.¹⁷ To relocate the saving significance of Christ's work entirely to the resurrection, while treating the cross as merely an example of worldly violence, is to tear apart what the New Testament holds together.

Third, Weaver's proposal actually reduces God's sovereignty in ways that undermine hope for victims. If God did not plan or purpose the cross, then God was not in control of the most important event in history. The powers of evil did something God did not intend, and God had to respond reactively by raising Jesus from the dead. But if God's plan can be thwarted by evil, what hope do victims have that God can and will deal with the evil done to them? A God who merely responds to evil is less reassuring than a God who sovereignly works through evil to accomplish redemption. The biblical picture is not of a God caught off guard by the violence of the cross, but of a God who "works all things according to the counsel of his will" (Ephesians 1:11, ESV), including the worst act of violence in history.

Fourth, the cross involves voluntary self-sacrifice, not imposed violence. This point was made powerfully by Jeffery, Ovey, and Sach. When human beings commit violence, they act against the will of those they harm, motivated by selfishness, hatred, or indifference. The cross is the opposite in every respect. The Son went willingly. The Father acted out of love for the world. The purpose was the salvation of the lost, not the gratification of the powerful. The result was the defeat of evil, not its perpetuation. To call this "violence" in the same sense that we call war, abuse, or oppression "violence" is to use the same word for utterly different realities.¹⁸

Fifth, even Weaver must acknowledge that the cross was violent — and that it was redemptive. This is the irony at the heart of Weaver's position. Even in his own "narrative Christus Victor" model, Jesus is killed by violence. Weaver cannot deny the violence of the crucifixion — the flogging, the crown of thorns, the nails, the agony of death by asphyxiation. And even in Weaver's model, this violent death is followed by the resurrection, which accomplishes salvation. So even on Weaver's own terms, a violent event leads to a redemptive outcome. The so-called "myth of redemptive violence" is, in the case of Jesus' death, not a myth at all.¹⁹

Sixth, the entire Old Testament sacrificial system was violent but had redemptive benefit. As we discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, the Levitical system involved the slaughter of animals — a bloody, visceral, violent set of rituals ordained by God for the atonement of His people's sins. Numbers 25 records the violent execution of Zimri by Phinehas, an act that was rewarded by God with a covenant of lasting priesthood because it stopped the plague among the Israelites. If God has never used violent acts for redemptive purposes, the entire sacrificial system becomes unintelligible.²⁰

None of this means that Christians should embrace violence as a way of life. The New Testament's ethic of enemy love, turning the other cheek, and overcoming evil with good (Romans 12:17–21; Matthew 5:38–48) remains binding on Christ's followers. But as Stott carefully shows, the reason Christians are forbidden to take revenge is not because retribution is inherently wrong. It is because retribution belongs to God, not to us. "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord" (Romans 12:19, ESV). God's exercise of justice through the cross is not a contradiction of the ethic of love. It is the very foundation of it.²¹

The Myth of Redemptive Violence: A Closer Look

The "myth of redemptive violence" language has become extremely influential in progressive Christian circles. The phrase originates with Walter Wink, who borrowed key ideas from the cultural anthropologist René Girard. According to this analysis, human cultures have always believed that violence can solve problems — that the way to overcome evil is to overpower it with greater force. Wink and Girard argued that this pattern is a "myth" in the technical sense: a foundational narrative that shapes how societies think and act. And they argued that Christianity, when it teaches penal substitution, simply replicates this myth at the cosmic level — God uses violence (the death of Jesus) to solve the problem of sin.²²

Jeffery, Ovey, and Sach offer a devastating response to this line of argument. They point out that Girard's framework is built on deeply problematic assumptions about Scripture. Girard treats Old Testament sacrifice not as God's appointed means of atonement but as a symptom of a dysfunctional, violent society. He dismisses numerous biblical passages as "legendary." He fundamentally misreads the Old Testament's understanding of divine wrath. Wink compounds these problems by adding the startling claim that Paul was "unable" to understand the true meaning of Jesus' sacrificial death, and that Christianity has suffered from this confusion ever since.²³

These are not minor criticisms. The Girard-Wink framework requires us to reject the authority of large portions of Scripture, dismiss the apostle Paul's understanding of the atonement, and reinterpret the entire Old Testament sacrificial system. For anyone who holds to the authority and inspiration of the Bible, this is simply too high a price to pay. It is ironic, as Jeffery, Ovey, and Sach note, that evangelicals like Steve Chalke and Stuart Murray Williams have relied heavily on the work of scholars whose approach to Scripture is fundamentally at odds with evangelical convictions about biblical authority.²⁴

IV. The Liberation Theology Concern: Does PSA Ignore Structural Sin?

The Objection

Liberation theology, which emerged in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s through the work of scholars like Gustavo Gutiérrez, Jon Sobrino, and Leonardo Boff, has raised a different kind of concern about penal substitutionary atonement. The liberationist critique is not primarily about violence or gender. It is about scope. The concern is this: PSA focuses on individual guilt and individual forgiveness, and in doing so it ignores the systemic, structural, and corporate dimensions of sin and salvation.²⁵

Liberation theologians argue that sin is not merely a matter of individual transgression against God. Sin is also embedded in structures, systems, and institutions — in economic exploitation, racial oppression, political tyranny, and cultural dehumanization. When the atonement is reduced to a transaction between an individual sinner and a holy God — "Jesus paid the penalty for my personal sins" — the prophetic, liberating, justice-oriented dimension of the gospel is lost. The cross becomes a private affair between the soul and God, with no implications for the transformation of unjust social structures.²⁶

Some liberation theologians go further and argue that penal substitution has actually been used to support oppressive systems. If the most important thing about the cross is that God dealt with individual guilt, then the urgent task of Christians is to get their souls right with God — not to challenge the political and economic structures that keep the poor in bondage. In this way, it is argued, PSA functions as an ideology of the status quo, diverting attention from injustice and channeling religious energy into private piety rather than public action.²⁷

This is a serious charge, and it deserves a serious response.

Responding to the Liberation Theology Concern

First, PSA does address individual guilt, and rightly so — because personal sin is real. The liberation theologians are right that sin has structural and systemic dimensions. But they are wrong if they suggest that individual guilt before God is unimportant or secondary. The Bible consistently addresses human beings as moral agents who are personally responsible for their sins. "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23, ESV). "The wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23, ESV). Jesus Himself called individuals to repentance: "Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish" (Luke 13:3, ESV). The prophets thundered against structural injustice, but they also called individuals to account for their personal rebellion against God.

Any theology that minimizes individual guilt before God has failed to take the Bible's teaching seriously. And any theology that cannot explain how a guilty individual can be made right with a holy God has failed to address the most fundamental human problem. PSA addresses this problem directly: the penalty for individual sin has been borne by Christ, and those who trust in Him are justified — declared righteous — before God. This is not a distraction from the gospel. It is the heart of the gospel.

Second, the atonement also has corporate and cosmic dimensions, and the multi-faceted model this book proposes fully includes them. As we argued in Chapter 24, penal substitution does not stand alone. It stands at the center of a constellation of atonement models that together capture the full reality of what Christ accomplished at the cross. Christus Victor addresses the cosmic dimension — Christ's victory over sin, death, and the powers of evil (as explored in Chapter 21). The reconciliation model addresses the relational and social dimension — the breaking down of barriers between God and humanity, and between human beings themselves (Ephesians 2:14–16). Recapitulation, as we discussed in Chapter 23, addresses the renewal of all creation through Christ's taking up and transforming human nature.

When these models are integrated with PSA at the center, the result is not a narrow, individualistic theology. It is a comprehensive vision of salvation that includes both the individual and the corporate, both the forensic and the cosmic, both the personal and the structural. The liberationist concern about structural sin is addressed — but it is addressed within a framework that also takes individual guilt seriously, as the Bible demands.

Third, penal substitution actually provides the strongest possible foundation for social justice. Jeffery, Ovey, and Sach make this case powerfully in their chapter on the Christian life. If God cares so deeply about justice that He was willing to bear the cost of satisfying it Himself, then justice is not a secondary concern in God's economy — it is central. A God who takes sin so seriously that He gives His own Son to deal with it is a God who will not tolerate injustice. As they argue, penal substitution "reminds us that God is concerned for justice" and therefore "provides a moral foundation for working for justice."²⁸

Moreover, the cross exposes the violence and injustice of the powers that killed Jesus. The Roman Empire, the corrupt religious establishment, the cowardice of Pilate, the betrayal of Judas — all of these structural and systemic evils are laid bare at the cross. The cross does not endorse the status quo. It judges it. And the resurrection declares that the powers of this world do not have the last word. God has the last word. And His word is justice, life, and liberation.

Fourth, the history of Christianity actually shows that belief in penal substitution has often been a powerful motivation for social action. William Wilberforce, who spent decades fighting the slave trade in Britain, was a committed evangelical who held firmly to penal substitutionary atonement. The great abolitionists, prison reformers, hospital founders, and champions of the poor throughout Christian history have often been men and women whose theology was shaped by a deep conviction that the cross reveals both the infinite value of every human being and the seriousness of sin in all its forms — personal and structural.²⁹

The claim that PSA leads inevitably to political quietism and indifference to injustice is simply not borne out by the historical record. The opposite is closer to the truth: a robust theology of the cross, which takes both personal sin and divine justice seriously, has often been the engine of the most powerful movements for social transformation in Christian history.

Fifth, liberation theology's own theological proposals often suffer from a weakened view of sin. When sin is reduced primarily to structural injustice, the individual's need for forgiveness and reconciliation with God can be lost. Gutiérrez himself acknowledged that liberation includes spiritual as well as political dimensions, but many liberation theologians in practice have focused so heavily on the political that the personal has been eclipsed. The result is a theology that addresses oppression but cannot adequately address guilt — a theology that liberates bodies but struggles to liberate souls. The full gospel addresses both, and it does so through the cross.

V. Engaging William Hess: Parallels with Pagan Sacrifice

Before we conclude, I want to engage briefly with one more contemporary objection that connects with several of the themes in this chapter. In his book Crushing the Great Serpent, William Hess devotes a full chapter to what he calls "Pagan Substitutionary Atonement." Hess argues that the structure of penal substitutionary atonement — an angry deity requiring the death of a victim to satisfy his wrath — bears disturbing parallels to pagan sacrificial systems. He suggests that PSA represents a paganization of the gospel, importing into Christian theology a fundamentally pagan understanding of how sacrifice works.³⁰

This objection is not new. C. H. Dodd famously argued in the mid-twentieth century that the Greek word hilastērion (ἱλαστήριον), often translated "propitiation" in Romans 3:25, should be rendered "expiation" instead — precisely because "propitiation" (the appeasing of an angry deity) sounded too pagan. We dealt with this exegetical argument in Chapter 8. But the broader cultural and theological version of the objection — that PSA makes God look like a pagan deity who needs to be placated — continues to circulate.

Response

First, superficial structural similarities do not prove that PSA is derived from paganism. Hess himself acknowledges this principle. He rightly warns against "parallelomania" — the tendency to assume that any structural similarity between Christianity and paganism proves borrowing or corruption. But having acknowledged this principle, Hess then proceeds to argue that the parallels between PSA and pagan sacrifice are too close for comfort. I think he overreaches here.³¹

The fundamental theological differences between biblical sacrifice and pagan sacrifice are enormous, and they are differences of kind, not merely of degree. As Stott argues, there are at least three critical distinctions. First, God's wrath in the Bible is not the capricious, unpredictable temper of pagan deities. It is His steady, righteous, and consistent opposition to evil. Second, in pagan religion, human beings attempt to appease an unwilling deity from below. In Christianity, God Himself provides the sacrifice from above — the initiative is entirely His. Third, the sacrifice God provides is not an animal or a commodity but Himself — in the person of His Son.³²

These differences are not minor refinements of a common pattern. They represent a total inversion of the pagan paradigm. In paganism, frightened humans try to buy off angry gods. In the gospel, a loving God gives Himself to rescue helpless sinners. The direction of movement, the motivation, and the agent are all reversed. To call both "sacrifice" and then conclude they are essentially the same is like calling both a hostage situation and a rescue mission "situations involving armed people" — technically true, but misleading to the point of absurdity.

Second, the existence of parallels between Christianity and paganism is exactly what we should expect if the Bible's own worldview is correct. Hess himself, to his credit, explores three possible explanations for religious parallels: a skeptical explanation (borrowing), a shared-worldview explanation (divine accommodation), and a divine council explanation (pagan distortion of original truth). I find his discussion of the divine council framework quite helpful. As he notes, if the spiritual beings behind pagan "gods" had some awareness of God's heavenly court before their rebellion, then we would expect pagan religion to contain distorted echoes of divine truth — including distorted forms of sacrifice.³³

But this is precisely the point. The parallels between Christianity and paganism do not prove that Christianity borrowed from paganism. They may well prove that paganism is a distortion of original truth — a truth that Scripture preserves in its pure form. The fact that pagan sacrificial systems bear some resemblance to biblical sacrifice is not an argument against the biblical system. It is evidence that the biblical system reflects a deep reality that even fallen beings and corrupted cultures could not entirely suppress. As Jeffery, Ovey, and Sach conclude, the character of God's wrath, the identity of the one who provides the sacrifice, and the nature of the offering are so utterly different from paganism that it is simply impossible to maintain that penal substitution rests on pagan ideas.³⁴

Third, Hess's argument proves too much. If we reject penal substitution because its structure bears some resemblance to pagan sacrifice, then on the same logic we should reject the entire Old Testament sacrificial system — which also involves blood, death, and the offering of a victim to deal with the consequences of sin. Indeed, we would have to reject any atonement model that involves the death of Jesus having saving significance, since even Hess's own preferred Christus Victor model requires that Christ's death accomplish something redemptive. The parallels between paganism and Christianity at the structural level are not an argument against PSA specifically. They are a feature of the relationship between truth and its distortions across all of human religion.

VI. Further Contemporary Voices: Womanist and Postcolonial Critiques

Before closing, I want to acknowledge briefly two other streams of contemporary critique that are often grouped with the feminist and liberationist objections.

Womanist theology, which emerges from the experience of Black women in America, has raised concerns about "surrogacy" — the historical pattern in which Black women were forced to serve as surrogates (whether in labor, in childcare, or even in sexual exploitation) for white families. Delores Williams, in her influential book Sisters in the Wilderness (1993), argued that a theology of substitution reinforces the pattern of surrogacy by suggesting that one person's suffering can and should stand in for another's. Williams preferred to emphasize the life and ministry of Jesus rather than His death, finding in Jesus' resistance to temptation and His solidarity with the marginalized a model for liberation that does not depend on redemptive suffering.³⁵

I find Williams's historical analysis of surrogacy deeply convicting. The exploitation of Black women through forced surrogacy is a monstrous injustice that Christians must name and condemn. But I believe her theological move — away from the cross and toward the life of Jesus as the center of salvation — cannot be sustained exegetically. The New Testament consistently places the cross at the center of salvation history. Paul resolves "to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified" (1 Corinthians 2:2, ESV). The earliest Christian confession is "Christ died for our sins" (1 Corinthians 15:3, ESV). We cannot downplay the saving significance of the cross without fundamentally altering the shape of the New Testament gospel.³⁶

At the same time, we should hear the painful truth in Williams's critique. If the theology of the cross has been used — even implicitly, even unintentionally — to normalize the suffering of Black women, then we must repent and correct that misuse. Christ's substitutionary death does not legitimate human patterns of forced surrogacy. It condemns them. The one who went to the cross voluntarily for all people is the one who declares that no human being should be exploited, used, or forced to suffer for the convenience of others.

Postcolonial theology has raised the concern that Western atonement theology — and PSA in particular — has been exported to non-Western cultures as part of the colonial project. The argument is that PSA reflects a distinctly Western, legal, forensic way of thinking about God and salvation, rooted in Roman legal categories and Enlightenment individualism. When missionaries imposed this framework on indigenous cultures, they simultaneously imposed Western cultural assumptions and suppressed local ways of understanding God's saving work.³⁷

There is something to this concern. Missionaries have sometimes been guilty of confusing the gospel itself with Western cultural packaging. And it is true that the forensic, courtroom metaphor is more at home in some cultures than others. But the postcolonial critique overreaches when it suggests that substitutionary and penal categories are merely Western cultural constructs. As we demonstrated in Chapters 14–15, penal and substitutionary language is present in Eastern as well as Western Church Fathers. As Schooping shows extensively, it pervades Eastern Orthodox hymnography and liturgy. And the biblical texts themselves — written in ancient Semitic and Greco-Roman contexts, not in Enlightenment Europe — use substitutionary and penal language pervasively.³⁸

The real issue is not whether PSA is "Western" but whether it is biblical. If the Bible teaches that Christ bore the penalty for our sins in our place, then this is not a Western cultural imposition. It is divine revelation. And divine revelation transcends all cultures, even as it must be expressed and applied within particular cultural contexts.

VII. Lessons Learned: How Should We Teach the Cross?

Having engaged these contemporary objections, I want to step back and draw some practical lessons. If the feminist, liberationist, and nonviolent critiques do not succeed in overturning penal substitutionary atonement, they do succeed in highlighting some areas where our teaching has been deficient or distorted. We should be humble enough to learn from them.

Lesson 1: We must teach the atonement in Trinitarian terms. The single most effective way to defuse the "cosmic child abuse" charge is to teach the cross as the unified action of the triune God. Father, Son, and Spirit act together in love. The Father does not punish an unwilling victim. The Son does not go reluctantly. The Spirit empowers and sustains the whole event. When we teach the cross this way — as the self-substitution of God, to use Stott's phrase — the caricature of an abusive Father and a victimized Son simply dissolves. As we argued in Chapter 20, there is no tension within the Trinity at the cross. There is only love.³⁹

Lesson 2: We must never use the cross to justify passive endurance of abuse. Christ's suffering was voluntary, unique, and unrepeatable. It is not a template for victims. When we call Christians to "take up their cross," we are calling them to self-denial in discipleship, not to passive acceptance of exploitation. Pastors and counselors have a sacred responsibility to protect the vulnerable, not to tell them that their suffering is redemptive. The cross frees victims from suffering. It does not baptize their suffering as God's will.

Lesson 3: We must present the cross as both personal and cosmic. PSA addresses individual guilt before God — and that is essential. But if that is the only thing we say about the cross, we have said too little. The cross also defeats the powers of evil (Christus Victor), reconciles alienated communities (Ephesians 2:14–16), restores broken creation (Colossians 1:20), and provides the foundation for justice in all its dimensions. The multi-faceted model we have argued for throughout this book — PSA at the center, with Christus Victor, reconciliation, recapitulation, and moral influence as complementary dimensions — is not a luxury. It is a necessity. A one-dimensional theology of the cross, however correct in what it affirms, will always be vulnerable to the charge that it ignores what it omits.

Lesson 4: We must connect the cross to justice and to action. The cross is not merely a truth to believe. It is a reality that transforms every dimension of life. If God cares about justice enough to bear its cost Himself, then we who follow the crucified God must also care about justice — in our families, our churches, our communities, and our world. A theology of the cross that produces only private piety and personal comfort has not fully grasped what the cross means. Jeffery, Ovey, and Sach rightly insist that penal substitution should stir believers to a passion for justice, a realism about sin, and a hope grounded in God's decisive victory over evil.⁴⁰

Lesson 5: We must teach with pastoral sensitivity. Theology is never merely academic. It touches real lives. When we teach about the cross, we are speaking to people who carry wounds — survivors of abuse, victims of injustice, people who have been hurt by other Christians. We must teach the truth with courage, but also with compassion. We must be willing to listen to the pain behind the objections, even when we ultimately disagree with the theological conclusions drawn from that pain. The goal is not to win an argument. The goal is to proclaim the love of God revealed at the cross in a way that heals rather than harms.

Conclusion: The Cross That Heals

The contemporary objections we have examined in this chapter are, at their best, driven by genuine pastoral concern. Feminist theologians are right that the cross should never be used to justify abuse. Liberation theologians are right that the gospel has implications for structural injustice. Advocates of nonviolence are right that Christians should be people of peace. These concerns are not enemies of the gospel. They are, in many cases, expressions of the gospel's own values.

But the theological conclusions these critics draw — that penal substitution must be abandoned, that the cross is a site of divine violence, that the atonement has no forensic or penal dimension — these conclusions do not follow from the concerns that motivate them. It is possible — indeed, it is necessary — to take these pastoral concerns seriously while also holding firmly to the New Testament's teaching that Christ died as our substitute, bearing the judicial consequences of our sins, in an act of unified Trinitarian love.

When we teach the cross rightly — as the self-substitution of the triune God, acting in love to bear the consequences of our sin — we find that the cross does not glorify violence. It defeats it. The cross does not endorse abuse. It condemns it. The cross does not ignore structural injustice. It provides the deepest possible foundation for opposing it. The cross does not silence the marginalized. It gives them a voice, because it declares that God Himself identifies with the suffering and the oppressed.

The cross heals precisely because it takes the full weight of human evil — personal and structural, individual and cosmic — and bears it. That is the power of penal substitutionary atonement. Not an angry God taking out His wrath on a helpless victim. Not a cosmic mechanism of violence. But a loving God, three-in-one, entering into the deepest darkness of human sin and death, and emerging on the other side with salvation in His hands.

Steve Chalke asked how we could believe that "at the cross this God of love suddenly decides to vent his anger and wrath on his own Son." The answer is that we don't believe that. We never have. What we believe is far more astonishing: that the God of love took our place, bore our penalty, absorbed our condemnation, and did it all because He loves us more than we can possibly comprehend. That is not cosmic child abuse. That is the gospel. And it is very, very good news.