The Atonement – Packer On Penal Substitution

This morning on his blog, Al Mohler reminded us of Jim Packer’s eloquent defense (in 1973) of penal substitution in a post entitled “The Logic of Penal Substitution.” In light of my ongoing series on the atonement, this is well worth the read. Mohler says this about Packer’s historic lecture:

“Packer starts by describing that the penal substitutionary understanding of the atonement ‘by and large, is a distinguishing mark of the world-wide evangelical fraternity.’ It is noteworthy that Packer expected his audience to accept that statement at face value. Just over thirty years ago it was safe to assume that most evangelicals understood the penal substitutionary view to be paramount.”

In his lecture, Packer outlines three views of the atonement, and says this when describing the third:

“The third type of account denies nothing asserted by the other two views save their assumption that they are complete . . . there is biblical support for all they say, but it [the third view] goes further. It grounds man’s plight as a victim of sin and Satan in the fact that, for all God’s daily goodness to him, as a sinner he stands under divine judgment, and his bondage to evil is the start of his sentence, and unless God’s rejection of him is turned into acceptance he is lost forever. On this view, Christ’s death had its effect first on God, who was hereby propitiated (or, better, who hereby propitiated himself), and only because it had this effect did it become an overthrowing of the powers of darkness and a revealing of God’s seeking and saving love. The thought here is that by dying Christ offered to God what the West has called satisfaction for sins, satisfaction which God’s own character dictated as the only means whereby his ‘no’ to us could become a ‘yes’, Whether this Godward satisfaction is understood as the homage of death itself, or death as the perfecting of holy obedience, or an undergoing of the God-forsakenness of hell, which is God’s final judgment on sin, or a perfect confession of man’s sins combined with entry into their bitterness by sympathetic identification, or all these things together (and nothing stops us combining them together), the shape of this view remains the same — that by undergoing the cross Jesus expiated our sins, propitiated our Maker, turned God’s ‘no’ to us into a ‘yes’, and so saved us. All forms of this view see Jesus as our representative substitute in fact, whether or not they call him that, but only certain versions of it represent his substitution as penal.”